Summary

DHH announces that 37signals has returned to its original configuration of having no full-time managers, after experimenting with traditional management roles for several years. Instead of dedicated managers, managerial duties like performance reviews, onboarding, and mentoring are distributed among senior individual contributors. He argues this minimalist approach dodges Parkinson's Law by preventing managerial work from expanding to fill available time. DHH acknowledges limitations—particularly around handling conflict and poor performance—but contends the arrangement works brilliantly at their scale of 60 people when you hire self-directed 'managers of one.' He concludes that after twenty-plus years, and having tried the alternative, he's fully committed to this model.

Key Insight

Distributing managerial duties among senior individual contributors rather than hiring dedicated managers creates a minimalist management culture that dodges Parkinson's Law and lets skilled, self-directed teams move at maximum speed.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 5

  We once more have no full-time managers whose sole function is to organize or direct the work of others.

• 7

  It's impossible for a full-time manager to scale their interventions down to zero hours per week and still feel like they're doing their job.

• 3

  This incentivizes a minimalist approach to management.

• 5

  Some weeks that means the managerial overhead is literally zero, as everyone is just busy getting their work done, and nobody needs anything.

• 5

  Small teams of highly competent managers of one can progress at an unbelievable pace.

• 4

  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.

• 7

  We're going to make this company work without full-time managers or die trying.

• 4

  Spending a couple of years with a more traditional structure was a wonderful experience because it cemented this fact.

Tone

opinionated, confident, reflective