Full-Stack Relationship Orgs
Replace support, success, research, PR and marketing with two teams that own a human relationship end to end.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Instead of the standard org chart, The Browser Company draws its teams around people rather than business functions. The membership team owns the entire relationship with anyone who has touched the product — day one onboarding, day 37 bug, day 58 mobile research — which collapses customer success, support and user research into one continuous relationship. The storytelling team owns everyone they don't yet have the privilege of serving — press, investors, marketing, eventually sales. Both are derived from first principles, not from industry job titles.
Origin
Josh Miller, reacting to what he saw at Facebook: the user research org there (he shouts out Loey and Jane) was extraordinary but functioned as a service organization to PM/engineering/design — a PM got assigned a researcher and decided how to use them. He took the opposite extreme at The Browser Company.
Core principles
- 01Customer support, customer service, customer success and user research are business terms, not natural categories. There is one human, and one relationship.
- 02Ask what you are actually trying to do, then find the most direct way to manifest it — even if nobody else organizes that way.
- 03Two populations exist: people you serve today (membership) and people you do not yet have the privilege of serving (storytelling). Everything else is a sub-case.
- 04Owning the relationship 'full stack' means the same team is present at first touch and at the point of shaping the roadmap.
- 05Deliberately hire radically different archetypes onto these teams — the anti-homogeneity move.
- 06Miller is candid: 'that must break down in 18 ways' — it definitely does. The org is a prototype, not a claim of superiority.
How to run it
- 1
Drop the industry job titles
List the functions you were about to hire (support, success, research, PR, marketing) and treat every one as a borrowed business term rather than a real thing that must exist.
- 2
Redraw the boundary around the human, not the function
Ask who is at the other end and what relationship you owe them from first touch until last. At The Browser Company the answer produced one team that owns everyone who has touched the product across their entire lifetime with it.
Pro tip Walk a timeline: day 1 'how do I use this', day 37 'I have a bug', day 58 'what do you want from mobile'. One team, one relationship, three modes.
- 3
Create the mirror team for the people you don't serve yet
Everyone who doesn't use the product — press, investors, the world at large — is one audience with one job: tell your story to them. Stand up a storytelling team that owns that holistically instead of splitting it into PR, IR and marketing.
- 4
Staff on incentives and archetype diversity, not pedigree
Design the team by asking what the team is, what its incentives are, and what disciplines sit on it. The Browser Company's three-person storytelling team is a former Verge reporter turned Snapchat marketing strategist (Ellis), a leader who writes poems after hours and wants to write a novel (Nash), and an ex-Facebook/White House designer turned indie filmmaker (Josh Lee) as video editor — deliberately as unlike each other as possible.
Pro tip Set the incentive at the level of the relationship, not the channel: the video editor is not told to make a TikTok account go viral, but to think about the people holistically.
Watch out Radical archetype diversity is harder to run than a homogeneous team. Miller says plainly it can be hard, and that he understands why large companies converge on 'the Facebook way'.
In the wild
Rather than staffing support, success and research separately, The Browser Company built one team that owns the human relationship from the moment someone first touches the product for as long as they have it — answering onboarding questions on day one, bugs on day 37, and asking what they want from mobile on day 58.
→ Deep, continuous member relationships feed directly into roadmap decisions, without the research-as-service-org dynamic Miller disliked at Facebook.
Nash (leader), Ellis (ex-Verge reporter, then seven years running marketing strategy at Snapchat) and Josh Lee (ex-Facebook design intern and White House intern, now an indie filmmaker) own all communication to people the company does not yet serve — press, investors, the world.
→ Content that makes viewers say they have never seen anything like it, and which Lenny compares to Airbnb's legendary early video team.
Common mistakes
Renaming without rewiring
Calling support 'membership' while keeping the same handoffs, incentives and reporting lines gets you novelty with none of the benefit. The point is that one team genuinely owns the relationship full stack.
Treating research as a service desk
The Facebook pattern Miller is reacting to: a brilliant research org that PMs requisition. Knowing the people you serve deeply has to be structural, not a ticket a PM files.
Assuming it scales
Miller says outright he has no idea how this scales to 500 people, and that a lot of it is not going well. Adopt it as a prototype in a small company, not as a target-state org design.
Is it for you?
Best for
Small, craft-driven companies (roughly under 100 people) willing to design their org from first principles rather than copy a standard startup chart.
Not ideal for
Scaled organizations that need clear career ladders and functional depth, or companies where compliance and specialization make blended ownership unworkable.
From the transcript
“business terms those are just industry terms at the end of the day what we're saying is if there is a human being from the…”
“other companies view that as different Origins but we view that as there are a bunch of people the other end of this that we…”
“our products for the first set of the last the storytelling team is about people we don't have the privilege of serving yet they don't…”
“don't we we start with first principles asking what could be what are we really trying to do here and what is the most direct…”
From the episode
Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product
Josh Miller (CEO)