Adaptive Habitat

Let’s talk about bamboo. Yes, I said bamboo. Did you know bamboo is not technically a tree? It’s a common misconception. It’s a type of giant grass. And it’s the perfect analogy for how to design a resilient team.

Bamboo spends its first years growing underground, establishing a vast, interconnected root system. And then, suddenly, bamboo shoots grow aggressively above ground, reaching full height in 30-60 days. This rate of growth is unmatched in the plant kingdom. While the root system, the rhizomes, are shallow, they extend wide and form a stable foundation for this rapid growth.

Bamboo as a structure is flexible, resilient, and deeply connected through its underground network of roots. As the shoots extend into the sky, they form dense clusters that naturally decay and regrow using the rhizome network (the foundation) they spent time building.

An oak tree is a different story. If bamboo is fast-growing, connected, and flexible, the oak is slow-growing, independent, and rigid. The structure of modern companies is designed like an oak tree, but we need bamboos to weather the constant changes in technology.

In 1967, the computer scientist and programmer Melvin Conway shared an idea about how organizations are designed:

[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

This idea is called Conway’s law. And it matters because the design of your organizational structure affects the products you create. In software, you feel it—those janky, disjointed products where you sign in and end up signing in again on another site like the one you just came from. Why? Separate teams built it. Why? The org chart.

I look to org charts to understand the communication structure at a company. The lines connecting the people are like circuits of communication or the rhizomes of the bamboo. Yes, people talk where there are no lines, but the common process is to talk to your organizational lineage—those above, below, and immediately adjacent to you. This becomes a hindrance to cross-functional and cross-team collaboration. If everyone is manipulating value, then disconnected communication stemming from organizational design creates a disjointed product. The value chain breaks and, as a result, the quality of the product suffers.

Humans are quick to adopt a system without understanding why it exists in the first place. You need to fight this tendency, understand the context the system was created in, and then create your expression of the idea, shaped to your unique context. This applies to how you think about and design anything, but we’ll focus on org charts and team structure here.

Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear, spoke about this in his talk titled The Heirloom Tomato Org Chart. He translated Conway’s law into a more modern interpretation of the idea:

You ship your org chart.

An org chart is your expression. There is no one-size-fits all static org chart. Shape your team around the work, not the work around the team. Be like the bamboo.

Or, as Nan Yu says:

Make an org chart you want to ship.

I want to extend this idea past how the org chart is designed to how it changes. What if the organizational structure could adapt as the surrounding environment shifts? Because in any complex system, survival relies on the ability to adapt, to change, to evolve. The bamboo has a radial fiber gradient, which is the unique way its fibers grow. The tough fibers are concentrated in the outer layer and decrease to the inner core, balancing high strength on the outside with a flexible absorption of energy on the inside. A balance of strength and flexibility—just what we need to design our organization and teams.

This idea is called Adaptive Habitat, a way to stay rooted in craft while staying fluid in formation. The three pillars are:

1. Vertical Foundations
2. Horizontal Formations
3. Dynamic Orchestration

(This idea lives in the 🦎 Clarity Climate of the Claritorium.)

Vertical Foundations

The first tension to address is handling career growth, mentorship, and skill development while staying fluid and adaptable. These functions are normally met through an organizational reporting structure around a single discipline. If you’re a designer, then you’re reporting to a more senior designer, manager, or executive. They, too, understand and practice (if you’re lucky) the same craft.

Their role is to help you:

• Grow in your career through increased responsibility matched to skill growth.
• Navigate craft challenges, team dynamics, and interpersonal relationships.
• Improve your skills with direct feedback and challenging projects.

As a designer, you work with engineers, product managers, and other product roles on key projects. You represent your discipline on a cross-functional team, but you always have a “home base” to return to.

Vertical Foundations are key functional areas that represent a single discipline. This area is designed to help people grow their soft skills through coaching and their hard skills through project work and feedback. They create stability and enable adaptation in how the teams form and orchestrate the work. This is what shows on the org chart. Design, engineering, and other functional disciplines arrange in a tidy reporting structure.

The foundation is important. You need stability to anchor the structure. It’s hard to build momentum if you change reporting structure with each project. Your manager will be a constant force to point out the common problems in each project you work on. They also know your skills and growth areas, which makes them your ideal champion when it’s time to form a project team.

The Vertical Foundations are like the rhizomes of the bamboo. Without strong roots, growth is hampered. They create a network to operate as shared craft foundations. Each shoot emerging from the ground is one living organism, not separate plants. Each functional discipline—Design, Engineering, Strategy—operates from a shared base of knowledge, tools, principles, mentorship, and support. And then they each rise as a single stalk within a collective.

Companies and teams with strong Vertical Foundations follow these principles:

1. Invest in craft through mentorship, feedback, and skill development.
2. Anchor in principles with shared standards, patterns, and practices.
3. Renew continuously by reflecting on lessons and improving the system.

Horizontal Formations

Most of your work as a designer, engineer, strategist, or other craft is rooted in projects—the time-bound initiatives that deliver value in the business. Projects are the currency of work. But, as a designer, you’re not working on a team with several designers. You’re working with strategists, engineers, data analysts, and QA engineers to solve problems. You bring your unique perspective to a collective, and grow your craft with others in your area.

This is the cross-functional team—the bamboo shoots bound together and stabilized through the strength of Vertical Foundations.

Horizontal Formations are the grove formations of the bamboo: the collection of shoots densely packed and ready to move in unison with the elements of nature. The team is brought together for a specific purpose: to complete a priority project, to solve a problem, and to make something people want.

When the wind blows, the massive bamboo groves shift and sway with the movement of the wind. Like the bamboo, teams must move with, not against the work:

• New priorities? Reassess and redirect.
• Changing scope? Find another path.
• Challenging unknowns? Answer them.

It’s all guesswork until you do the work. The wind blows, rainstorms roll through, and unknowns swirl in the air. To be ready, teams must move in unison, build strong roots, and stay adaptable to change. And it starts with shaping your teams around the work. Define clear business outcomes and form cross-functional teams to execute on the work.

Companies and teams with strong Horizontal Formations follow these principles:

1. Shape teams to the work by forming cross-functional groups around outcomes, not org charts.
2. Move as one against shared goals, decisions, and directions.
3. Create space to thrive by balancing autonomy and collaboration.

Dynamic Orchestration

When my oldest son was around 2 years old, he loved playing with blocks. We would spend hours sitting and building elaborate towers together. Before we built a new tower, I’d always tell him the same thing:

Start with a solid base.

Because, without a solid foundation, you can’t grow and adapt to the inevitable changes. In this case, a two-year-old adding asymmetrical and awkwardly placed pieces. In an organization, it’s the changing market, new priorities, and technological advances. To build resilience into your team, company, and organization, you need a solid foundation. You need a solid base, like the bamboo rhizome.

What makes a bamboo grove resilient isn’t just the stalks or the canopy—it’s the rhizome beneath the surface, a living network as the unseen infrastructure. When the wind blows hard and a stalk breaks, the rhizome allows for rapid regrowth. The grove stays strong as it reinforces itself, all thanks to the diligent efforts to build a solid base.

In an organization, the solid base is:

• Shared understanding from context.
• Shared meaning from principles.
• Shared rhythm from rituals.

Context is the rich nutrients that flow through the roots to keep them healthy. Downstream decisions rely on upstream understanding. If you want to make high-quality decisions, you need high-fidelity context.

Principles are the growth pattern instilled in the roots and stalks, directing shape, integrity, and consistency. Principles are foundational truths that leave space for expressions, and are my favorite way to stay resilient.

Rituals are the circulation system that keeps the bamboo alive, pumping energy and sustained momentum into the system. Without strong rituals, context goes stale and principles become static ideals, not living embodiments.

Companies and teams with strong Dynamic Orchestration follow these principles:

1. Keep context flowing by sharing learnings early, often, and everywhere.
2. Align through principles to use shared values as a compass for change.
3. Sustain rhythm through rituals to maintain predictable cadences.

Bamboo Teams

Typical product teams are cross-functional, yet they work dysfunctionally. Work is handed off without context or understanding across the disciplines. Important details are missed and it shows up in the solution.

Bamboo Teams are resilient teams of Product Builders shaped around the work. The Product Builders are the bamboo, the team the grove. The individual resilience of Product Builders is multiplied by the collective resilience of the Bamboo Team. The Adaptive Habitat is shared soil, nourishing the team with context to deliver value. Each Product Builder brings depth in craft but flexibility in mindset. They blend design, engineering, and strategy into a single adaptive flow. Instead of a team of specialists handing work to one another, the Bamboo Team moves in unison to deliver continuous value against a clear outcome.

Bamboo Teams are:

1. Outcome-Shaped: They organize around an outcome, not a feature.
2. Craft-Connected: They work in unison across design, engineering, and strategy.
3. Rhythm-Driven: They stay aligned through predictable rhythms.

With the standard approach

In a standard product environment, feedback—from stakeholders, customers, the market—dictates features to work on. Those features usually map to a company objective like increasing customer retention. A cross-functional product team is responsible for delivering the feature to hit the target. So they talk to customers. A product manager will have customer interviews with users who have left and stuck around, seeking insights for what changes to make in the product to increase retention. They settle on a feature and move into design, all while drafting an extensive requirements document that details how to build the feature. The high-fidelity mockups drive the expectations, and the doc specifies how to get there.

But there’s a problem: that’s not how building software works!

The design that’s handed over to the engineers quickly becomes unusable. There’s no API for the expected functionality, the designed interface doesn’t work with the current architecture, and there’s missing functionality because the engineer didn’t look at the right page in the Figma file.

The work is awkwardly handed between the disciplines without the throughput of context. The team scrambles and hobbles across the finish line, delivering the half-baked feature to production well past the deadline. They bring up the problems in a retro, yet the process just repeats on the next project.

With a Bamboo Team

The organization identifies the objective to increase retention. A Bamboo Team is formed, but first the objective is reframed into a clear and measurable outcome:

Increase month one user retention by 25%.

Increasing retention is a continuous goal. You can’t form a Bamboo Team without an Outcome-Shaped target to focus on.

The work required to deliver on this outcome needs the right Product Builders:

1. A Product Lead to lean into strategy, own the outcome, and make sure the work is moving and connected to business needs.
2. A Designer to identify user-focused experience designs that increase retention.
3. Two Engineers to de-risk technical feasibility, deliver experiments, and build against larger bets the team identifies.

Remember, each of these team members are trained as Product Builders. That means, in addition to their craft focus, they understand the adjacent disciplines and how they connect into a cohesive whole. While this team is not dissimilar from the makeup of a standard product team, they move as one and share the same context, are in the same room, and start the work at the same time. There’s no handing off work from one discipline to another.

They define unique rhythms to support the team in their work. Since this outcome is aggressive, the energy of the rhythms need to match up with what the work demands. When a Bamboo Team forms, they decide on:

1. The Cycle: How long the team will work with full focus before a reset.
2. The Tempo: How frequent the feedback loops to review progress occur.
3. The Rhythm: How the team aligns and creates visibility of progress.

The Cycle

The Cycle is the appetite—how much time you’re willing to spend on the project. I’ve typically used standard six-week cycles with a two-week cool-down in between (from the Shape Up method), but a Bamboo Team is formed around an outcome, so the duration of the cycle should align with the ambiguity and urgency of the work. Instead of picking shaped projects to work on within a standard cadence, you create a time box around a single outcome that the Bamboo Team will break down and deliver in shaped projects. They own the framing of the problems, shaping of the solutions, and building of the end product.

The Cycle sizes are:

1. Short 2-3 week cycles.
2. Standard 4-6 week cycles.
3. Extended 8-12 week cycles.

When the time runs out on a cycle, the team resets and decides whether to:

1. Renew and start a new cycle against the same outcome (redefined).
2. Reform with the same team on another outcome or related issue to maintain momentum of the team.
3. Reflect and review the impact and how the team worked together before disbanding.

For this outcome, let’s put the team on an eight-week cycle to make meaningful changes.

The Tempo

All work operates at different paces. When you’re dealing with high ambiguity and high urgency, you need a fast pace. Doing so allows you to capture feedback quickly so you can readjust and move forward. When the problem is clear and there’s less unknowns, you can keep the pace steady. The Tempo is like the pacing of the music. And it can change in reaction to the work.

The Tempo can be:

1. Fast when you are deep in discovery and learning new things daily.
2. Balanced when you are iterating in continuous delivery.
3. Steady when you are more stable and need deeper focus and slower feedback loops.

Given the nature of the outcome, the Bamboo Team in this example needs a Fast Tempo to move from ambiguity to clarity. But this tempo can also change during the cycle.

The Rhythm

If the Tempo is the pacing, then the Rhythm is the pattern it creates. Different tempos feed different rhythms. This is the heartbeat.

Because of the Fast Tempo, the Bamboo Team creates a specific rhythm designed to control the tempo and speed of learning:

1. Morning Async Plan: Each team member posts in the team chat to share what they’re focused on completing that day.
2. End-of-day Review: The team syncs on a video call to share learnings and context.
3. Weekly Demos: At the end of the week, the team demos their work, discusses, and aligns on next steps.

Again, these rhythms are not dissimilar from what you might be used to. The subtle nuance is how the context of work drives the rhythms, not an arbitrary process applied generally. Let the work itself be the compass instead of an org chart and outdated process. Set a standard baseline, but adjust as necessary.

A New Way

The Adaptive Habitat is a different way to approach product work, shaped by my personal experiences across a wide range of companies, teams, and products. At its core, the structure provides predictability in an adaptive environment. Instead of starting with the organizational structure, you start with the outcomes you want to achieve. Use them to define the shape of the effort.

Vertical Foundations maintain consistency in craft and career growth.

Horizontal Formations bring the disciplines together to work against a clear outcome.

Dynamic Orchestration lets you adapt as the work changes and evolves.

The Bamboo Team is a clear expression of the Adaptive Habitat. It provides a model for shaping teams around the work, instead of work around your teams. It creates space for AI and technological innovations. Maybe one Product Builder can deploy multiple AI agents in a single Bamboo Team. This can work when there’s less unknowns and lower risk. You apply leverage intentionally to map the right resources to the needs of the business.

In a world of rapid change, cultivating an adaptive environment is the way forward.