The Flux Capacitor

In the early days of starting the team at eero, its leadership structure was very straightforward: our head of product, our most senior engineer, and myself. Three people, complementary skills, fast decisions. Where a lot of teams have some level of contention especially between product and engineering, we had deliberate shared ownership instead, and it worked really well.

As the org grew into what became the Software Services organization, spanning multiple teams and dozens of engineers across several countries, we started bringing on new leaders and standing up new teams from scratch. Rather than reinvent the leadership structure each time, I modeled every new team after what had already worked so well in that first small one: an engineering manager, a product manager, and one or more senior engineers, all with real, shared ownership. The senior engineers weren't just there for technical input either. They got a formal voice in roadmap planning, in raising concerns about the team, in keeping decisions grounded in what was actually happening on the ground, not just what looked good in a planning doc.

As for the name: I mentioned that I like to make sure we don't take everything too seriously. Given that the flux capacitor is shaped like a triad (go watch Back to the Future if you don't get the reference), I decided that's how we should label our teams' leadership groups: the Flux Capacitor. To this day, each of my teams has a Flux Capacitor meeting on their calendars.

The structure landed well. Engineering managers had a clearer operating model. Senior engineers had a real seat at the table, which helped both retention and the quality of roadmap decisions. And the leaders one layer below me got genuine autonomy: they weren't waiting on me for permission, they had what they needed to run their team well.

It scaled cleanly too. As we added teams, the model just replicated. Every new team knew exactly what their leadership structure looked like from day one, no reinvention required.

Good org design isn't about control. It's about giving the right people the right context and the right authority to make good decisions without you. The flux capacitor worked because it balanced three things that are usually in tension: engineering judgment, product direction, and technical ground truth. Put those three in a room together with real authority, and things move faster, and the decisions are better.

And naming it something fun didn't hurt. People remember the Flux Capacitor. Nobody remembers “leadership triad.”