Coinbase to do away with slide decks, streamline product teams

Coinbase Co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong (Image source: LinkedIn)

After a slew of layoffs last month, Coinbase Co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong is now restructuring the global cryptocurrency exchange platform’s internal teams, reporting hierarchies and way of work to remain more efficient, agile, and focussed on profitability.

“After 18 months of ~200% y/y employee growth, many of our internal tools and organizing principles have started to strain or break. So we’ve been digging in to identify the set of changes we need to make to help us succeed at this new scale,” Armstrong wrote in a blog post dated July 12.

One of the key updates involves enabling product leaders of different teams to make decisions to execute faster, them needing to inform seniors higher up to take a call. This was brought in as Coinbase currently has several products and a huge team.

The company will also be splitting its teams into smaller ‘pods’, which will limit the number of members in a team to less than 10 at any given point.

“Within each product, we will be defining pods of <10 people working on a specific feature or area. If a pod grows to be more than 10 people, it will be time to split it in two and assign each one a more specific goal or focus. Pods also need to have a focus, and a north star metric that ties into the overall company metrics,” Armstrong said.

Following this, team leaders will have access to PnL’s of their products and other performance metrics to make better decisions.

Armstrong explained, “Each of our products has well-funded competitors that are dedicated companies. We believe the right way to compete is to incentivize our product leaders to also run their product more like a standalone company. Companies must achieve profitable growth on some reasonable time horizon.”

Not slide decks in meetings

Coinbase is experimenting with banning slide decks, engineering teams will now have to show up with their products instead in the meetings. While the teams will be allowed to use a dashboard with their metrics and Figma mockups, they will still have to show the product and use it live.

“Inside growing companies, there’s a danger that product and engineering teams start shipping great slide decks instead of great products. It can be tempting to “manage up” and feel like a meeting went great with a beautiful deck shown to superiors. But our customers never see the slide decks we create. They only see the product,” he said.

Teams will also have to share their APIs for smoother functioning across teams for shared features and offerings instead of having meetings.