This is interesting, because at 47 people they're in transitional scaling. Like they've had to solve "too many teams for the CTO to manage directly" but not "too many teams to align effectively".
At 15 strong self-directed teams, you can have a few teams focused on the high level directives, and a few entropy repair teams that mostly self-manage.
The way to think about it is maybe like homeostasis. Self-directed product teams will implement new features, fix bugs, and generally keep the thing on track, but the efficiency drops off as the feedback mechanisms of talking to customers reaches equilibrium.
To mix metaphors, a leadership team creates a kind of current flow in that system. When you're small you can go to each of those teams and ensure that current flow is happening.
But at a larger size, that doesn't work. You have to engineer and carefully craft the feedback mechanisms the teams are working off of to induce that current. This is a hard problem, but it's where things like minimum attrition policies, OKRs, etc spring from: leadership trying to have a policy that induces current.
At 15 strong self-directed teams, you can have a few teams focused on the high level directives, and a few entropy repair teams that mostly self-manage.
The way to think about it is maybe like homeostasis. Self-directed product teams will implement new features, fix bugs, and generally keep the thing on track, but the efficiency drops off as the feedback mechanisms of talking to customers reaches equilibrium.
To mix metaphors, a leadership team creates a kind of current flow in that system. When you're small you can go to each of those teams and ensure that current flow is happening.
But at a larger size, that doesn't work. You have to engineer and carefully craft the feedback mechanisms the teams are working off of to induce that current. This is a hard problem, but it's where things like minimum attrition policies, OKRs, etc spring from: leadership trying to have a policy that induces current.