As an organization grows from a single-product, single-market company, the way that you engineer products and take them to market needs to change.
Most companies start out as functional organizations – with teams for engineering, sales, marketing, finance, etc.
But, as you grow, it becomes harder to balance innovation with scale. The greatest companies are able to innovate at scale.
At Rubicon Project, we grew rapidly. We’re operating in eight different countries today; we’ve done four significant technology acquisitions; and we now have multiple products in the market.
We’ve grown through multiple stages. Stage 1 – Innovation; Stage 2 – Scale; and now we’re entering Stage 3 – Innovation at Scale.
A large part of this has to do with organizational structure. We’re in the middle of a move from a functional organization to a strong matrix / divisional organization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_structure
The advantages of this new structure are:
- Ownership of every product, so we can run products as businesses
- Discreet measurement, investment and ROI, so we can rapidly innovate and scale
- The ability to balance rapid innovation for new products with scale for existing market-leading products
This type of organization is similar to what you might find at companies like Amazon, Apple and Google.
But it’s not easy to build – it takes a lot of planning, commitment, discipline, investment, the right people and, most importantly, a cultural and mindset shift.
It’s definitely worth it, though.
And we’re already seeing the benefits. A great example is the way we’re rapidly innovating and scaling our mobile product.
