In our previous post, we discussed the strategic guiding principles that enable our mission. In this post we address one of the greatest challenges in engineering– how to create an organizational structure that supports growth while remaining agile, retaining technical expertise, and fostering collaboration across the company.

For these reasons, we’ve adopted a Pod-based structure—cross-functional teams focused on specific product areas–at PointFive.

Why Pods?

The goal of a Pod-based structure is to create independent, dedicated teams focused on specific domains. For us, these are things like AWS, GCP, Azure, or our core platform. This approach offers several key advantages:

• Empowering Teams: More autonomy and less dependency on others.
• Maximizing Technical Expertise: Each Pod specializes in its domain, enabling deep technical knowledge.
• Reducing Cognitive Load: Clear focus helps everyone work more efficiently.
• Fostering Innovation: Each Pod operates like a “mini-company”, allowing for faster development and execution.

Encouraging Knowledge Sharing: Moving between Pods is possible—and even encouraged—to broaden expertise, enhance collaboration, and help retain talent.

What Does This Look Like in Practice?

Our Pod structure is designed for efficiency and clarity, with these defining characteristics:

• Focused Teams: Each Pod includes a Product Manager, a researcher, and engineers who collaborate closely.
• Unified Workflows: Regular meeting cadence, such as daily stand-ups, bi-weekly planning, and retrospectives, ensure alignment and progress.

Defined Task Management: Each Pod manages a shared backlog (We use Linear Teams for that), making coordination and tracking easy.

The Role of the Platform Pod

In addition to Pods focused on specific clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP), we have a central Platform Pod that binds the entire system. Its responsibilities include:

• Creating reliable APIs for seamless integration.
• Building unified data models to support multi-cloud operations.
• Designing a coherent user experience while maintaining system reliability.

The Platform Pod ensures that all systems work harmoniously and efficiently, enabling other Pods to focus on their domains (AWS/GCP/Azure, etc..) without worrying about cross-cloud integration.

Addressing Functional Gaps with Forums

Our Pod structure empowers teams with deep product focus, but technical areas like Frontend, Data Collection, and Data Platform can slip between the cracks. To bridge these gaps, we added functional forums (sometimes called “Guilds”) where members from different Pods:

• Share Best Practices: Exchange insights on common challenges.
• Standardize Approaches: Align on tools and processes for shared functions.
• Collaborate on Infrastructure: Ensure consistency across all Pods.

This approach ensures that while Pods stay product-focused, we maintain excellence and innovation in essential, functional areas where technical expertise is crucial.

As the team grows, we may eventually establish dedicated infrastructure teams. However, for now, we're intentionally postponing that to ensure our shared infrastructure remains tightly integrated with evolving product needs, avoiding premature optimization.

Why This Works for Us

A Pod-based structure isn’t right for every organization, but for us—dealing with the complexity of multi-cloud environments and diverse customer needs—it’s a game changer. It allows us to move quickly, work efficiently, and maintain the highest standards of quality.