Project Flatten

At a recent People Ops meetup, we got deep into the topic of how we can can keep Status a place where Core Contributors can do their best work without being limited by traditional organizational structures - we called it `Project Flatten’, and we outlined some ideas here.

We're stoked by the participation and the good feedback collected on that thread, as well as direct messages and chats during the last few days. Here’s a quick summary of how we’ll go about it next:

• We’re retiring the People Lead role.
• This doesn’t mean there is no need for ownership and accountability. Ideally every group - be it a swarm, team, function, or any other ad-hoc conglomerate of core contributors will have a governance discussion, where they vote on what functions are needed and who will be owning them. We recommend that these structures are documented on Discuss in order to be able to easily identify who is accountable for what.
• For the Financial side of things we will implement more transparent practices (open expense reports and burn rate, remove approval levels, create resourcefulness awards) and will continue to strive for more transparency.
• People Ops is going to take responsibility for most of the tasks related to onboarding, new hire guides, contributor experience, coaching, career navigation, providing feedback, performance trajectories etc.
• We will document our ideas and projects on Discuss for transparency and we welcome collaboration (and debate) from all core contributors, cross-functionally.
• Several of the needs we identified earlier on are being worked on already - see improvements to the trial period & feedback giving; prioritization of hiring efforts; contributor experience; communication, etc.
• When bringing in new core contributors, hiring teams will try to make consensus based hiring decisions. Although the "people lead" won't exists, there may still be an owner accountable.

Stay tuned for more specifics in the course of the next weeks - and let us know if any questions!