The Case Against Flat Org Structure
I get why everyone loves flat orgs. They sound cool, modern, empowered... A place where everyone’s a leader, and no one has to report to anyone else. Especially in tech, especially in product.
It’s the dream, right? A sea of senior PMs, each owning “big strategic initiatives,” working hand-in-hand with leadership. No hierarchy. No bureaucracy. Just freedom.
Except… There’s a catch.
Watching teams rise, stall, and quietly burn out, I’ve noticed something. And I want to alert you to my findings. When you flatten the structure, you don’t remove the work of management. You just hide it.
The Myth of Middle Management
In big companies, middle managers often don’t manage people. They manage information.
Who knows what. Who should know what. Who forgot to tell someone something.
It’s messy, repetitive, sometimes absurd, but it’s also what keeps an organization moving in the same direction.
Now, imagine AI taking over that role. It’s already trying. We’ve got AIs writing emails (the kind you’d rather have another AI summarize for you), updating dashboards, and “distributing context” across teams. The promise? Information flows perfectly. No middle managers needed.
Sounds elegant. Almost utopian.
Until you realize that when you remove the people who carry context, you also remove the people who care about it.
What Actually Happens When You Go Flat
You end up creating an organization for senior PMs only.
You eliminate paths for growth because when everyone’s a “lead,” the only way to move is sideways. Or the highway.
You drain domain knowledge over time because your top people move on and you have no juniors to train.
You raise the risk of burnout because without clear support structures, autonomy starts feeling a lot like isolation.
And worst of all, you erase the one competitive advantage humans still have over machines:
The ability to care.
The Void Behind the Title
I’m not saying we need more layers. Nobody wants that.
But when you remove a title, you also remove the work behind that title. And unless someone deliberately fills that void, the team starts to drift.
Flat doesn’t mean leaderless.
It just means the leadership work gets redistributed, usually to the people least equipped or least willing to carry it.
Leave the Team Better Than You Found It
There’s an old Scout’s rule in coding: always leave the code cleaner than you found it.
Maybe leaders should do the same… with teams.
Because if you flatten everything so much that nobody’s left to shape, grow, or protect the people doing the work, you’re not building a stronger system. You’re just erasing the parts of it that make it human.