No Management Team and Roles at VSHN Anymore

VSHN started as a small team making decisions collaboratively around one table. However, as the company expanded, it became unclear how to make bigger strategic and organizational change decisions, and a management team attempted to decide, leading to feelings of disconnection among employees from the decision-making processes. To tackle this, VSHN started to value principles and use patterns from Sociocracy 3.0, over the years fostering a structure and practices that emphasized self-organization rather than hierarchy, which helped clarify team roles and responsibilities. While much still isn’t clarified, it works, and we have a way to evolve the structures and practices further and support the personal development toward more self-responsibility with our VSHNeers.

As the organization evolved, it formed specialized teams focused on delivering customer value, and additionally teams or roles such as HR, Finance, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support, among others. The role of the "General Manager" was maintained as a safety net for overarching issues but ultimately proved ineffective due to a gap between management and day-to-day operations, and hindering collaboration through the psychological effect that came with "being management" that doesn’t decide but still interferes everywhere.

Recognizing these limitations, VSHN moves towards greater collaboration and even more distributed responsibilities. Consequently, around June 2024, VSHN officially removed the "management team" and "general manager" roles, solidifying its commitment to a decentralized, self-managed structure. As the people who had these roles stay in VSHN and mostly take the same responsibilities, just shared with others in other roles, the risks are seen as minimal - it’s expected that most VSHNeers don’t even feel much of this step.

This is a huge topic and can’t be explained properly with a TL;DR. Start reading more about how VSHN works here. Still, as an overview, here are the most important aspects in summary:

In the IT world, it’s becoming increasingly common for IT and software teams to operate without team leads, often adopting agile workflows, team coaches, or scrum masters, and sometimes having dedicated or shared product owners. Such teams can work very autonomously in the interest of the organization or their customers. The responsibility for delivery lies with the whole team, with key roles like the Product Owner (PO) and Scrum Master (SM) providing support as part of the team.

VSHN works like that, just on the scale of the whole organization.

However, in many organizations, including those in the IT sector, having a "Top Management Team" and C-Level roles remains common. These roles typically take overall responsibility for the business or organization. Our customers, accustomed to such structures, often expect us to be organized similarly and may ask for our CEO, for example. We simply don’t have this at VSHN.

As explained in "C-Level Titles", we do not misrepresent our structure externally. We do not claim to have a management team or C-Levels at VSHN. VSHN is different, and this difference is not negative for our customers.

According to Swiss law, the Board ("Verwaltungsrat") holds the "Geschäftsführung" unless it is delegated to some form of "General Managers", a Management Team, etc. This was the case until June 2024. Moving forward, this responsibility will revert to the Board, while day-to-day operations will continue within VSHN. The Board will oversee this process, so there are no legal issues.

In terms of how we work and handle things within VSHN, the Board has no relevance, but as it’s the same people, they already know. So the Board is no escalation point for VSHNeers; we address operational, strategy, organizational, or personal issues within VSHN, together.