Writing the company down

We sat down to write Findev down: who does what, who is responsible for what, where one function ends and the next begins. An AI agent needs all of this written down. Tools and formats are a separate question; this post is only about what has to be written, not where.

Any company more or less knows its own structure, and so did we: the nine functions below would have surprised nobody here, and we understood most of who does what. What did not exist was the written version, with every recurring duty sorted into a function. The detailed sorting is what surfaced the rest, mostly in places where one person carries duties from several functions at once.

Over the years, operational duties had ended up with whoever was convenient, not with the department they formally belong to. People, including me, were doing work from entirely different departments. And there was nothing wrong with that. At our size those duties did not justify dedicated people, so they went to whoever was closest. Nobody wrote it down, because everyone involved knew how it worked.

The problem: all of this lived in heads, where neither a machine nor a new employee can read it.

So we straightened it out. We named the functions in standard corporate terms, sorted every recurring duty into one of them, and separated roles from people: one person can still hold several roles, but every role now belongs to a named function.

Here is the structure, all nine functions:

1. Corporate Management. Strategy, governance, company-wide metrics and management reporting
2. Business Development and Marketing. New client acquisition, pipeline, brand
3. Account Management. The existing book of business: contracts, rates, invoicing triggers, renewals
4. Delivery. The productive capacity: engineering, staffing, quality, everything we actually build and run
5. Finance. Accounting and management accounting, treasury, billing, payroll, tax
6. Legal and Compliance. Entities, commercial contracts, employment law, regulatory compliance, IP
7. Human Resources. Hiring, people operations, compensation, learning, employee relations
8. Operations. Offices across countries, travel, vendors, events, internal admin
9. Information Technology. Subscriptions, knowledge architecture, security operations

Part of the list is an invention. Some of these functions do not exist at Findev as departments. There is no Operations team and no IT team; this work is done part-time by people whose main job is elsewhere. We named the functions anyway: the map had to be complete, and a future agent taking a piece of this work has to understand who it is, even if today nobody holds that role full-time.

The result: Findev is now described in a language that we understand and a machine will understand too.