After experimenting with a number of management roles over the last few years, 37signals is back to its original configuration: None. We once more have no full-time managers whose sole function is to organize or direct the work of others. Everyone doing management here does so on the side, next to their primary work as an individual contributor. Including Jason and I. And it works.

That's not to say that there's no managerial work at 37signals. We still do yearly performance reviews, have onboarding duties for new colleagues, schedule on-call coverage, and supervise junior work. But instead of gathering all those responsibilities with a few full-time managers, we've distributed the load among the senior staff.

This incentivizes a minimalist approach to management. Instead of lining up a recurring schedule of weekly one-on-ones, we drive status updates and check-ins by automated questions. Instead of assigning five-six-seven reports to a single person, we make every lead and principle programmer responsible for one mentee. 

With this distribution, there's no longer a fixed forty hours for managerial duties to expand into, and so we dodge Parkinson's Law. Because everyone we have doing a small share of the management would usually rather get back to their own work as quickly as possible. Some weeks that means the managerial overhead is literally zero, as everyone is just busy getting their work done, and nobody needs anything. 

You just can't do that in a traditional setup. It's impossible for a full-time manager to scale their inventions down to zero hours per week and still feel like they're doing their job.

Now I'm sure that this arrangement would be difficult to maintain at a grand scale. When you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of employees, you're naturally going to yearn for more structure and hierarchy. But that's not the case at around 60 people, which is where we are.

It's also not the case when you hire, mentor, and promote managers of one. People with both the competence and drive to set their own agenda and follow it autonomously. People who don't need weekly one-on-ones with a manager to stay on track. People who thrive on long stretches of uninterrupted time.

That's the kind of people we seek to hire and develop at 37signals. And I find that it's easier to steer that development when someone's primary manager is also their professional superior. You're likely to learn faster and frankly respect that person more.

This is the old Steve Jobs quip about "they knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything" that followed his experience hiring professional managers rather than letting the best individual contributors do the management. I wouldn't go that far. I do think there are plenty of professional managers who've had solid experience "doing things", but I still think the general principle holds, if they're not better at "doing things" than the people they're managing.

But even so, it's still a trade off. I've found that the hardest part of the managerial burden to distribute broadly is dealing with conflict and poor performance. There are a lot of senior staff willing and able to help mentor and manage juniors and peers who are on a solid trajectory and acting as managers of one. It's a much smaller group who welcomes dealing with reports who can't keep up or repeatedly gets lost.

So for this to work, you have to realize the limitations of the manager-less arrangement. There's got to be someone else in the organization who can direct or even take over when an employee needs strong, repeated "redirecting feedback" (what a euphemism!). That's the deal. Those cases will have to bubble up to the top.

But is that really so bad? If cases of poor performance keeps bubbling up, there's a fundamental problem somewhere in the process anyway, and that can usually only be definitively addressed by the top. Are we not hiring the right people? Are we unclear in our expectations? Are we too diffident in our feedback? These are root cause problems that require root cause reparations. 

When all this works, the result is astounding. Small teams of highly competent managers of one can progress at an unbelievable pace. Left to just do their job, they get it done, and are in  turn rewarded with that precious job satisfaction of really making a direct, personal difference. There's nothing better than shipping quickly alongside peers you respect highly.

After twenty-plus years of running a company like this, I can tell you that I no longer have any interest in working any other way. Spending a couple of years with a more traditional structure was a wonderful experience because it cemented this fact. We're going to make this company work without full-time managers or die trying.