When Kit Krugman joined Foursquare as senior vice president of people and culture two years ago, the geospatial data company was stuck. Products that should have launched in months were taking years. Krugman described the engineering organization as “calcified,” with layers of bureaucracy that had hardened over 15 years.
To restructure the organization, Krugman says she took two essential steps. In September of 2024, engineering and HR leadership first created teams of engineers and technical leads that could operate autonomously, rather than having to work team-level issues through various groups and processes. The second, bigger step: In January of 2025, the company eliminated nearly all manager roles in engineering, flattened job bands so that everyone has the same “software engineer” title, and reorganized teams around tech leads that are focused solely on technical excellence.
The results have been dramatic. “We went from struggling to launch products for two years to monthly or bimonthly launches,” Krugman said in a Charter Forum session last September.
Still, getting there required rethinking everything from performance management to career development, and accepting that some people would opt out. We followed up with Krugman for a more in-depth interview about why Foursquare made such a dramatic change, and what they learned in the process. We’ve pulled together excerpts from both that interview and her Forum session below, edited for space and clarity:
What drove you to make such a radical change?
We had built up calcification of processes and enterprise-grade systems that were basically slowing the product organization to a halt. We kept hearing from engineers that there was just so much process work outside of actually shipping code, and that was one of the big things slowing them down.
How did you approach the restructure?
The belief that underpinned everything we did was that a high-performing team is more impactful than a team of high performers. That is what we needed to design our entire system around.
Most performance systems are individual-based. [They reward] individual performance, often at the expense of the team; [provide] low incentive[s] to share information or learn from one another; and often reward the most visible performers, under-rewarding supporters and operators.
When we thought about [going] team-based, we wanted more cooperative behavior. We wanted better group and individual performance, but through the lens of, ‘How are you contributing to the group?’ We wanted members to share, learn, and motivate each other.
What does the tech lead role actually do?
We have tech leads dedicated to specific products or subsets of products. Technical leads are responsible for technical excellence of the product, and they’re responsible for facilitating team effectiveness in the sense that the team needs to work well together, be responsibly resourced, [and] have a balanced workload. We try to minimize classic managerial asks of them [such as performance reviews].
How did you handle compensation without manager titles?
We still have a career matrix. People are aware that they’re a level-one or level-two software engineer, and we still consider advancing and promoting people to the next level. The level determines compensation to ensure equity..… [The career matrix is] based on the leadership principles and team-based framework we created that emphasizes taking ownership and navigating ambiguity. It’s all tied together.
As you advance, you take on more and more complex problems. If someone’s not able to operate at a systems level, that just means they’re not at that level yet and shouldn’t be compensated [accordingly].
What happened to manager responsibilities around performance management?
When someone needs support, we make the call on who’s most appropriate. In some instances, that will be a tech lead. In others, it might be an executive. [Our CEO and chief technology officer] are deeply involved in the work. It’s very hands-on right now. They are very much living this builder’s culture.
How do you collect feedback and input for performance management in this new structure?
The big immediate shift we made was [moving to] performance conversations informed by input from teammates. That doesn’t sound particularly different or innovative, but we decided to choose a platform [called Confirm] that did something called an organizational network analysis. It asks only three questions: Who are your star performers, who have you been influenced by, and who do you want to flag for more support? We have found that it’s pretty reflective of reality.
How do you handle mentorship without managers?
When we rolled this out, we shifted to team effectiveness coaching [versus coaching individuals]. We used the framework of the behaviors that we were coaching to, [created] a baseline survey, and started with engineering. We essentially put the engineering groups into product delivery ‘pods’ and made them relatively cross-functional. We met with them once a month for a six- to eight-month period….We established baseline surveys on team effectiveness behaviors, then resurveyed twice to see the increase in where we were still struggling. We saw a pretty significant increase in terms of team effectiveness.
What would you do differently?
We probably could have clarified roles a bit more sharply. We just put together some material that really clarifies, crystallizes, and helps people understand what the tech lead role does and doesn’t do. It’s different from a classic manager. Maybe we could have done a little bit more of that upfront.
Where do you go next with this model?
On our people team roadmap, AI enablement is one of our top priorities. I immediately saw the gaps around coaching and feedback that you would get from [not having] classic managerial structures. The opportunity then becomes how you fill those gaps with [AI] or how you pull resources to people really fast. We’re pursuing two paths: a pilot program on coaching and feedback that we’re going to be doubling down on, and finding ways to amplify context in the right ways [for example, sharing clear goals and progress on metrics more broadly].
What advice would you give other leaders hoping to try something like this?
I credit Gary [Little, Foursquare’s CEO] with having the courage and the boldness to make a radical decision and sit with the consequences, and be comfortable with people opting out or into that design.
One of the other changes we made was to ensure we were reflecting the change in our recruiting process. We overhauled our careers page to explicitly say this is our operating model.
[Finally, remember] if you only put in one piece [for example, just eliminating manager titles], you’re not going to actually build a cohesive system that works and delivers the ultimate results that you want.
For more ideas on managing people, see:
- The importance of performance management in uncertain times
- What managers need to do differently because of AI
- How to make every manager a product manager