Maintaining an Accurate Org Chart

The number of times in my career that I’ve spoken with an engineer who doesn’t know which team owns a particular service or whom to ask a specific question is shocking. Whether you’re an individual contributor or an engineering manager, knowing who’s in your team, organization, department, and company is invaluable. Yes, it’s even more important for managers, but the engineers who know how to reach across teams and get answers are often the people who get things done.

I keep an up-to-date org chart in Whimsical for my org and often refer to our HR software when I need to verify something in my broader department or across the company. While an HR system’s company-wide org chart can be useful, I strongly recommend maintaining a dedicated org chart for Product & Engineering. An org chart is far more valuable when you can layer in additional context and meaning.

A good org chart should be more than just names and reporting structure. It should group people into teams, indicate their roles, and map them to the services they own—congratulations, now you also have a Service Directory!

Arm your engineers with this information and make everyone responsible for keeping it up to date.