No Classic Management at VSHN

The VSHN Anchor Circle is where company strategy lives and where governance for all teams and roles within VSHN is defined. Governance means setting the purpose, the framework, and enabling constraints — not making operational decisions.

The VSHN Circle is led by three roles that share the governance responsibilities:

These roles are not classic "top management", instead they focus on governance — ensuring that what needs to be delegated is clearly delegated, and taking care of what is not yet delegated. For everything that is delegated, decision-making authority remains with the responsible circle (team or role).

The Board is explicitly defined as a role outside the VSHN Circle. The Board holds the VSHN Circle accountable, provides the highest-level strategic direction and financial targets, and collaborates on company strategy and budgets.

VSHN started as a small team making decisions collaboratively. As the company grew, it became unclear how to make strategic and organizational decisions. An early management team created feelings of disconnection among employees from decision-making. Over the years, VSHN adopted principles and patterns from Sociocracy 3.0, fostering self-organization rather than hierarchy.

We experimented with various structures — a "General Manager" role was maintained as a safety net but proved ineffective due to the gap between management intent and day-to-day operations. The psychological effect of "being management" interfered with collaboration even when that wasn’t the intent.

In June 2024, VSHN officially removed the remaining "management team" and "general manager" roles. However, about a year later a gap became apparent: the responsibility between the Board setting direction and Product Managers running their products was undefined. No one was explicitly accountable for company-level strategy and translating Board direction into a coherent plan. This led to ad hoc decisions and unclear priorities.

By 2026, we recognized that we needed explicit governance at the company level and people to actually do the strategy work, conduct domain reviews, handle financial planning, and maintain oversight. The VSHN Anchor Circle with its three leadership roles was explicitly defined to fill this gap — not as traditional management, but primarily as governance roles that ensure clarity, alignment, and that most responsibilities are delegated inward to the teams and roles best positioned to handle them.

In the IT world, teams operating autonomously without traditional team leads is increasingly common. VSHN works like that, just at the scale of the whole organization.

However, many organizations still have "Top Management" and C-Level roles. Our customers, accustomed to such structures, may expect similar from us. We do not misrepresent our structure externally — VSHN is different, and this difference is not negative for our customers.

As explained in "C-Level Titles", we do not claim to have traditional C-Levels at VSHN.

According to Swiss law, the Board ("Verwaltungsrat") holds the "Geschäftsführung" unless delegated to General Managers or a Management Team. This responsibility now rests with the Board, while day-to-day operations continue within VSHN.

For VSHNeers, the Board is not an escalation point — we address operational, strategy, organizational, or personal issues within VSHN, together.