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.
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:
Encouraging Knowledge Sharing: Moving between Pods is possible—and even encouraged—to broaden expertise, enhance collaboration, and help retain talent.
Our Pod structure is designed for efficiency and clarity, with these defining characteristics:
Defined Task Management: Each Pod manages a shared backlog (We use Linear Teams for that), making coordination and tracking easy.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
In our next post, we’ll discuss how to align processes and workflows within this structure to deliver value faster while maintaining flexibility and focus.