Service β Technology
Structuring and running a product department
Restructuring a siloed organization into a product-oriented structure
The service
Structuring a multi-team product department or organization (blockchain, mobile, web, or any other combination of technical stacks) to align the products being built with the teams building them.
- Diagnosis of the existing setup
- Design of a suitable organizational structure
- Support through the transition with the teams involved
The transferable principle
An effective organization is neither purely vertical (cross-functional, product-oriented, at the risk of losing technical consistency) nor purely horizontal (stack-oriented, at the risk of losing product consistency). It holds the balance between the two, deliberately, with a dedicated coordination mechanism for each axis.
Case study
Context
I took over the product department of a Web3 financial services company β a cross-functional tribe of more than 20 people, structured into three parallel technical teams (blockchain, mobile, web), working closely with design, QA, and marketing teams β reporting directly to the CEO.
The real problem
The department's processes needed clarifying and organizing. It was structured by technical stack: a blockchain team, a mobile team, a web team, each separate.
Every sub-product in the ecosystem (digital wallet, crypto-fiat payment card, exchange platform, bridges to other ecosystems, etc.) passed through different development teams at each stage. Coordination relied on ad hoc syncs between teams rather than an organization built around each product.
The challenge: structure the department around products, while keeping the teams technically consistent.
The approach
Before any reorganization, the department's processes were clarified and structured end to end β the longest step, and the least visible from outside.
Restructuring into product-oriented teams: each sub-product in the ecosystem got its own cross-functional team, with dedicated blockchain, mobile, and web developers, within an international organization (English and Russian as working languages). Regular syncs by technical stack were kept running in parallel, to preserve horizontal consistency across sub-products.
The goal: hold the balance between vertical performance (each product moves fast, with a dedicated team that knows it end to end) and horizontal consistency (the technology stays uniform from one product to the next).
The result
Teams welcomed the change, with direct recognition from several contributors of the improvement to their day-to-day work.
Overall: better communication and coordination across teams, and parallel project management that became simpler and delegable to motivated talent within the department.