Buildrs Notes · 8 min
Designing a Team of Teams
Everything else — names, counts, org charts — is downstream of that one call.
The three axes
| Axis | Workflow (stage)Axis 1 | Domain (industry)Axis 2 | Goal (outcome)Axis 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Use when | One artifact moves through steps, and each step needs different tools or standards. | Knowledge genuinely doesn't transfer — different vocabulary, sources, regulations, buyers. | Two efforts would make opposite calls on the same decision, and you want that tension explicit. |
| Each team owns | A stage: research → draft → review → publish | A body of context: insurance, healthcare, fintech | A metric: acquire, retain, expand |
| Fails by | Lost handoffs. Context evaporates between stages; team 3 doesn't know why team 1 chose what it did. | Duplication. Five teams each rebuild the same drafting and review capability. | Collision. Two teams unknowingly do the same work, or fight over the same surface. |
Same business, split three ways
An agency doing client work, content, and one product:
Pick the one where crossing the line hurts most. If your healthcare and retail work share nothing but a logo, split by domain. If every project runs the identical five steps, split by workflow and stop there — that's a pipeline, and pipelines are cheaper and more reliable than agent teams.
Depth: three machine layers, max
You (escalations only) → orchestrator → team leads → workers
Allie Miller runs exactly this: her → Simon (AI chief of staff) → six directors → 34 agents. Every layer past that multiplies failure points without adding capability — orchestrators-of-orchestrators is where these systems start eating themselves.
Model routing follows depth. Her subagents run on Haiku and Sonnet; Opus is reserved for heavy work. Keep the orchestration on your strongest model — deciding what goes where is the hard part — and push the cheap models down to the workers.
Naming: start borrowed, then evolve
Her warning: 2015 job titles produce a 2015 org. Name everything CMO / CPO / frontend engineer and you've rebuilt a company from a decade ago.
But her advice is also to start there, because it's legible. The move is to start with borrowed titles and then earn your way off them — because agents cost roughly nothing at the margin, so you can hire roles no human budget would approve:
Worth noting honestly: her own six directors are split by business function (education, client work, ops, marketing, product) — which is the goal axis in 2015 clothing. She'd say that's fine as a starting shape. It's also why one of her watchdogs specifically hunts duplicate work — that's the goal split's known failure mode, patched.
The design prompt
I run [business]. Team is [N humans]. We do [what]. Our goals this quarter: [goals]. Before proposing anything, interview me one question at a time on: where my work already splits naturally, which boundaries are expensive to cross, and what I keep re-explaining. Then propose an agent org with: - the split axis you chose (workflow / domain / goal) and why - 3 machine layers max - what each team owns and what it must NOT touch - one friction-watcher whose only job is logging where I keep correcting output - which layers run cheap models vs. the strongest one Do not use job titles from a 2015 org chart unless you can defend each one.
Before you build any of it
Two checks, in order:
- The necessity test. For every team: what does this one know or reach that the last one didn't? No answer, no team.
- The invariant. Write two columns before you expand anything — may now touch (grows freely) and may act unsupervised (moves only on purpose). Breadth is the knob you turn. Risk is the one you weld.
Standing it up takes about three hours. Getting it to 90% took her months, because the fixes are specific to how you actually work. Both halves of that are true.