Culture for product-led growth:

How to implement flat spaces in your company

So how do you create flat spaces at work?

A few weeks back, I wrote about how crucial it is to create “flat spaces” for modern workers like the software creatives I work with every day. The main idea is that building a culture that prizes the best ideas regardless of hierarchy gives you an edge to make your business grow faster.

So how exactly do you do this? First of all, the short answers are a) I have some experience, theories and practices I will explain below, but there is so much more to learn and b) it really depends on team makeup and culture.

I will share with you some of the things I’ve tried and where I’ve seen some success — they will help. However, the most important thing is to have a goal for building “Flat Spaces” and trying different things. The real world is the best lab. If you do this consistently, you will get better outcomes than average and see a more profitable company.

Creating flat spaces can be simple once you understand the benefits, and accept the cultural shift from a top-down hierarchical leadership style and culture; to a top AND bottom, team-based leadership culture. At Calendly, the system we used looked like the following:

Some examples of flat spaces at Calendly

Every Monday, we had a flat space (actualized as a meeting) about what customer problems we wanted to solve and the scope of them. We called this meeting, ‘Product Trust’. These problems generally came off the roadmap. But to be featured in product trust, the PM and their team had to dig into the problem deeply. They considered (and presented) a wide range of factors — customer challenges/problems and their urgency, customer feedback, competitive intelligence, market opportunity, an understanding of the customer workflows and more. The audience was other PMs from other squads at different levels and representatives from Sales, Support and Design. Usually we could do 2 problems at a time and any team could elect to come and present.

On Wednesdays we had a flat space that took ideas that had been developed into designs and complete user experiences, and reviewed them with a multidisciplinary team of design, support and product.

While I am proud of these top level rituals that allowed crucial decisions to be examined in an egalitarian way, the ones that really made a difference were those flat spaces that the team constructed organically — customer discovery calls routinely included engineers and QA when available. Feature user research sessions included Research, PM, Design and Engineers. Squads solved problems in a much more egalitarian manner. PM, Engineering and Design leads met every 2 weeks to consider the pace of work and remove roadblocks on process. Prep for ‘Product Trust’ became more shared/distributed with a team.

Flat spaces isn’t so much about better meetings with more diverse participants. It’s about an attitude of inclusive leadership that has a specific focus on making sure that you shake the trees for the best ideas from the people in your team.

Building flat spaces for your own team

Here are some steps for building flat spaces that have worked for me:

1. The first thing to do is to deconstruct your innovation process (draw it out or lay out its steps). Here is a generic example:

• Try to map out how your team creates and executes ideas. It’s helpful if this is either written in steps or drawn visually. Usually its starts with creating a vision and direction, splitting up pieces of it and assigning to teams. And then those teams execute a cycle of innovation and execution — vetting ideas, sharing them in documents and translating them in a precise way, so that people can execute. And there are meetings that help everyone be on the same page.
• Lay it all out as much as you can.

2. Identify or create a critical path in the process that leads to key decisions and approvals.

• Try to identify a critical path in your process that starts the team in a critical direction
• It’s usually a step that requires the broadest perspective from different roles/people on the team. In this case I’ve circled “decide on a solution”.

3. Open that up to more voices and people. Think about whether it can be open to a multi-disciplinary group that doesn’t traditionally have to weigh in.

• Open up that step to more people ASAP.
• Strategies include an inclusive meeting, a call for comments (note that for involved process, a meeting is more efficient because not everyone has time to read async when you absolutely need the feedback)

4. Establish ‘micro-culture’ for that step in the process. Some suggestions include:

• A clear goal(s) that are frequently stated for the benefit of new members.
• Clear ways to engage and comment (don’t attack people, focus on the merit of ideas)
• Calling on silent participants. Reward the act of speaking up.
• Brevity and clarity coupled with few interruptions.
• Clear outcomes at the end (options: yes, no, maybe).
• Establish a Clear DACI.

5. Measure and adjust

• If the participants are too many, prune so it can be more impactful.
• Focus on filtering for believability and diversity of skillset and viewpoints.
• Check to see if decisions made are holding up further down in the process and with customers

6. Get feedback and refine — every instance of a flat space is only valuable if valued by the participants. There are no cool/virtue points for trying; an effective flat space is 100x better than an ineffective one.

It’s possible to get flat spaces wrong. Be clear on the goals of creating one in the first place — for example, I don’t think a flat space gives people a platform just for the sake of it (for therapy reasons or even mere inclusion). I think you have them to have more effective solving of the business challenges at hand. The biggest challenge with creating flat spaces is knowing how to encourage and keep creative debate flowing while pruning off or discouraging unproductive side channels. Just like anything in product, flat spaces have to be monitored to make sure it continues to solve real problems.

You can create flat spaces at all levels. It’s a versatile product tool because it’s basically a principled belief that successfully harnessing your entire team can yield better outcomes. So everyone from starting product managers to chief product officers, can use the tactics to good effect. Like all things though, don’t focus on dogma and make sure people understand the essence so they can adjust for impact.

Nota Bene: a reminder of the many benefits to creating flat spaces

1. Its culturally infectious. Leads and managers will take a cue from it and give room for creativity at the edges of their team. It teaches your organization, the respect for ideas and encourages team members that creative and thorough thinking is the path to recognition.

2. Its empowering to the team because it shows them that hierarchy is not the most important thing to having an impact.

3. Along with other leadership tactics, it saves the organization from some mistakes and therefore costs (lost time); thus increasing profits or at minimum, time to product market fit

4. Its solves problems more efficiently when you can harness the focused thinking of the entire team.