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Structural Redesign · Product Organizations

Your product organization is designed to produce the dysfunction you keep trying to fix.

The method

Capability transfer, not a report. I work with you, not for you — building the capability, not renting it out.

Scaling problems that survive every reorg. Frameworks that get installed and absorbed. Your best people leaving because the system punishes what they're good at.

The problems you keep fixing aren't execution failures. They're structural outputs — a structure you can diagnose, then redesign.

We study the live system together: where coordination breaks, which structural conditions keep producing the same problems, and what your organization is actually optimized to do. The test: when I leave, your team reads the structure better than when I arrived.

01Diagnosis

Four symptoms of the same structure.

AYou hired 40 more engineers and got slower.The org chart organized them by specialty. Every feature crosses five boundaries. The coordination cost ate the capacity.
BThe framework worked for a quarter, then everything reverted.Scrum, SAFe, OKRs: the practice was installed. The structural conditions that produced the original problem were untouched. The system absorbed the reform.
CYour best people are leaving, and exit interviews say "culture."The structure measures individual output. Promotions reward specialization. The people who see cross-team problems have no structural home for solving them. So they leave.
DYou keep solving the same problem every six months.Nobody designed this. Incentives, reporting lines, and the planning process recreate the problem after every fix. The structure is doing exactly what it was built to do.

None of it is an execution failure. Each is a structural output the system was built to produce — and a structure you can diagnose, you can redesign.

02The Starting Point

The Diagnostic Sprint

A diagnostic sprint tests whether these patterns operate in your organization. We study how work actually flows: where coordination breaks, which structural conditions keep reproducing the same problems, and what the system is optimized to produce regardless of what the strategy says.

You get a written diagnosis, concrete next moves, and the beginning of a shared language your team can use to see the structure without me.

Book a Triage CallStart with a short, free triage call — together we decide whether a sprint is the right next step.
Engagement
First stepTriage call
DurationFixed days, based on scope
PricingFixed-price
ScopeBounded
DeliverableWritten diagnosis
You keepThe report

For practitioners building structural thinking skills: 1:1 mentoring and team workshops. Ask about mentoring

03Evidence

Why me

Case 01
Enterprise Software · YSoft · 400 people
Reorganized 400 people around customer outcomes.

BeforeR&D organized by specialty. Every feature crossed five team boundaries. Product managers spent more time negotiating between teams than understanding customers.

AfterCoordination layers dissolved because the conditions that required them no longer existed. Teams now own their own hiring, promotions, and escalation.

Case study on less.works
Case 02
Financial Services · Major Czech Bank · 10,000 people · 6 years
Product development on the bank's most critical platform — then the model for the whole bank.

BeforeFive million lines — the most business-critical system in the bank — owned component by component, in places by single individuals, each responsible for a fragment of the code. Integration was tested by hand; every release meant coordinating dozens of them.

AfterA team of teams now develops the platform as one product, whole and end to end — with continuous integration as a way of working, not just a pipeline. The bank later adopted the approach company-wide as its Product Design Engineering model, which I co-designed.

portrait
Michal Donát

Inside product organizations that hit the same structural walls — and the diagnostic practice that came from refusing to treat them as execution problems. Selected for workshops at LeadCraft and the Engineering Leadership Conference.

05Start Here

Two questions worth thinking about before we talk.

No funnel. The answers tell me whether a sprint is the right first move.

or book a triage call directly