Pod/Matrix Team Approach in Startups

A couple years ago the co-founder of Rackspace told his success story to the EO Atlanta chapter. One of the takeaways I enjoyed from the event was the concept of the pod/matrix approach. Morris, the co-founder, recounted Rackspace hitting several hundred employees and feeling the growing pains trying to service customers with fanatical support. They had dozens of people of in their support department, dozens of account managers interfacing with customers, and dozens of people in accounting to field all the billing questions.

Departments where having difficulties with more and more layers of management and customer complaints were increasing. In addition, the executive team was really concerned as to how they would scale the entire business from a few hundred people to a few thousand. The solution was a pod system where teams of five were built to handle the majority of customer questions quickly and efficiently. Pods were built to match the most common customer requests:

• Two Tier 1 support reps
• One Tier 2 support rep for harder technical issues
• One account manager for sales
• One accounting clerk for billing

With these pods in place, scaling the business was simply a matter of having more and more of these teams as they added more and more accounts. Problem solved.

What else? What are you thoughts on a pod/matrix system like this?