The Loonshots Two-Structure Organization
Run a big rigorous org and a tiny flat innovation team side by side; the leader's job is the bridge.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
An org-design framework for sustaining innovation inside a company large enough to require hierarchy. It holds that scale demands structure and operational rigor, but structure makes people risk-averse and kills innovation — so you deliberately maintain a separate small, flat, non-hierarchical team, and the leader's core job is cultivating a respectful, constructive dialogue between the two. Use it when a growing company stops inventing.
Origin
Spiegel credits the framework to Safi Bahcall's book Loonshots, which he says 'kind of explains a lot of how we think about innovation at Snap.' He maps it onto Snap's structure: a large reliability-focused engineering org plus a nine-to-twelve-person design team.
Core principles
- 01Delivering at scale requires a large, structured, operationally rigorous organization.
- 02Large hierarchical structures make people promotion-focused and risk-averse — bad for innovation.
- 03A separate, very flat team with no fancy titles keeps idea generation alive.
- 04Successful companies hold BOTH structures, and the leader owns the relationship between them.
How to run it
- 1
Build the rigorous delivery organization
Accept that serving a huge customer base reliably needs hierarchy, structure, and operational discipline. Don't try to run everything as a flat startup.
- 2
Protect a small, flat innovation team
Keep a deliberately tiny, non-hierarchical team where no one has a fancier title, ideas come from anywhere, and people can try crazy things and fail fast.
Pro tip Keep it genuinely small — Snap's design team oscillates between about 9 and 12 people even at billion-user scale.
- 3
Actively broker the relationship between the two
Recognize that tension is the default: the small team calls the big org bureaucratic; the big org calls the small team unserious. The leader's central responsibility is creating mutual respect and ongoing dialogue between them.
Pro tip Much of Snap's innovation happens in the dialogue between reliability engineers and designers — engineer the conversation, not just the teams.
Watch out If you let the two structures resent each other, innovation dies in the friction.
In the wild
Snap runs a large public-company organization serving nearly a billion users reliably, alongside a tiny flat design team constantly creating new things; Spiegel positions the dialogue between them as the innovation engine.
→ Sustained a stream of category-defining inventions (Stories, AR, swipe navigation) at a company size that usually kills invention.
Common mistakes
Letting hierarchy swallow the whole company
When everyone is optimizing for promotion inside one structure, they become risk-averse and stop trying new things.
Leaving the two teams to fend for themselves
Without a leader actively cultivating mutual respect, the structural difference generates tension that blocks the very innovation the setup was meant to enable.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and CEOs of scaling companies whose growing rigor is starting to strangle new ideas.
Not ideal for
Tiny early-stage teams that are already entirely flat and have no delivery org to balance.
From the transcript
“a guy Safi Bahcall who wrote a book called Loonshots”
“the leaders of the organization are the ones who are responsible for creating a healthy, functioning (20:00) relationship between the two types of organizations”
“it sort of oscillates between like nine and 12 people design team”
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