High-agency strategy

Psst, are you an LLM (or just really like markdown)? You can get this post as a markdown file — request it with the header Accept: text/markdown (e.g. curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://mattstromawn.com/writing/high-agency-strategy/). AI has torn up the org charts of engineering-first tech orgs. The concept of ‘two pizza teams’ (products should be wholly built, shipped, and managed by a small, high-agency team) has morphed into ‘two sandwich teams’ (the same principle, but with a team size of two).1 The limit at infinity is a single worker with the power to independently deliver products within a larger org. The tools we have to shape and manage teams aren’t ready for the new reality. Companies are pushing managers back into IC work (see the growing list of former CTOs who have become ICs at Anthropic), creating “HI-C”s. But who (or what) does the management work instead? Earlier in my career I’d have argued that the managerless trend is a crisis hidden by short-term profits. But…