The org design guide (and why you need a dynamic org chart)

Every strategic decision can eventually map back to a question about org design and structure. Who owns what? How does work flow between teams? Which teams are responsible for which outcomes? What does the next version of the org chart need to look like to get us to our goals?

When those questions get answered well, the company moves faster. When they can’t be answered or have inconsistent answers, companies drift and execution stalls.

Org design is a team effort, but ultimately falls on People and Talent teams to maintain and iterate on. But companies evolve too quickly, hiring cycles change too much, and cost misalignment is too high for your org chart to live in a static document.

Modern org design only works if the structure of the company is a living, connected model rather than a static diagram. Implementing a dynamic org chart gives you the infrastructure to design, adapt, and operationalize the organizational structure at the speed the business demands.

Why good org design matters (and why it’s so hard)

Strong org design is what gives a company clarity, speed, and accountability. When roles, reporting lines, and team structures line up with strategy, everyone moves faster. Decisions get made at the right level. Leaders know what they own. Talent teams know what they’re hiring for. And employees understand how their work connects to the goals of the business.

“I think about effective org design as, ‘What’s the right organizational structure that creates clarity of function, roles, and responsibilities across functional teams to get to an aligned outcome?’” — Somrat Niyogi, former GM of Gusto

But modern SaaS growth breaks static structures almost instantly. New product bets emerge. Priorities shift mid-quarter. Teams reorganize themselves informally long before anything gets documented. What looked logical on a slide deck three months ago no longer matches the reality of how the company operates.

The root of the problem isn’t that People and Talent teams don’t know how to design an org. It’s that the systems that hold the truth about the organization don’t agree with each other.

• The HRIS shows today’s team.
• The ATS shows tomorrow’s team.
• The finance plan shows the team the company can afford.

None of these systems talk to each other, and none reflect the real-time movement of people, roles, or hiring.

Somrat calls this gap the source of “messy” org design. Leaders design structure in slides, track hiring in spreadsheets, and adjust plans in email threads, while the actual organization continues to evolve underneath them. The result is constant version drift and a growing sense that no one is looking at the same company.

For People and Talent leaders, this gap has real consequences. It slows decision-making, hides span-of-control issues, complicates backfills, obscures budget impact, and makes it almost impossible to plan proactively. You’re expected to keep the structure aligned to strategy, but the tools you’re given are static, disconnected, and outdated the moment you export anything.

That’s why org design feels both essential and perpetually difficult: the business evolves continuously, while the systems meant to represent the org stay frozen in time.

The 6 principles of modern org design

If org design is going to keep pace with how the business actually moves, it needs more than a well-drawn chart. It needs a set of operating principles that keep structure, budget, roles, and hiring aligned even as things change. 

These principles are the patterns shared by companies that design organizations deliberately instead of reactively. And they form the foundation of a dynamic org chart that stays accurate long after the planning meeting ends.

If you want to see how all of them work together in a solution that combines all these principles, watch how our dynamic org chart feature works.

1. Org design must be continuous, not annual

Most companies still treat org design like an annual ritual: build the structure, publish the slide, hope it holds. But the organization never sits still. Teams shift, priorities change, hiring stalls or accelerates, and leaders reorganize their groups long before anything makes its way into a deck.

According to Somrat Niyogi, the only way to keep the org healthy is to revisit it on a regular basis. Quarterly leadership sessions. Frequent scenario reviews. Real conversations about span of control, coverage gaps, and how new initiatives reshape the structure. Static plans can’t keep up with the pace of modern SaaS growth, but continuous design can.

That’s the shift People and Talent leaders are already feeling. You’re no longer maintaining an org chart. You’re maintaining an operating system. And that requires a real-time view of how structure, hiring progress, and budget intersect.

This is where a dynamic org chart makes the difference. Instead of rebuilding models from scratch every cycle, you work inside a living view of the organization — synced to the HRIS, ATS, and financial plan — so every adjustment reflects what’s actually happening. Continuous design stops being a heavy lift and becomes the natural rhythm of how the business runs.

2. Good org design starts with structure before people

One of the fastest ways org design goes sideways is when teams start with names instead of needs. The moment you anchor a structure around individuals, the conversation becomes emotional, political, or constrained by who’s already in which seat.

Somrat pushes leaders to flip the process:

“Take every name out. If the structure only works with the people you already have, you don’t have a real design.” — Somrat Niyogi

When you strip the org down to objectives, scope, and reporting logic, the right structure becomes obvious. Span of control issues surface. Duplicate roles disappear. New capabilities reveal themselves. And you get to a cleaner future state without debating personalities.

This is where a dynamic modeling environment matters. In TeamOhana’s sandbox, leaders can sketch the “pure” structure first then layer people back in once the design makes sense. It turns a sensitive, emotionally loaded exercise into an objective one, and it gives People and Talent teams a safe way to explore future-state structures without breaking anything in production.

3. Org design requires visibility into current, pending, and future headcount

Most org charts only show a snapshot of today’s team. They’re a picture of who’s in-seat right now, which makes them fine for orientation but almost useless for designing what comes next. The real org structure includes people who haven’t started yet, backfills in flight, roles tied up in approvals, and future-state hires already committed in the plan.

When People and Talent teams can’t see all three states at once, they wind up designing structure in the dark. Span of control looks stable until three pending hires land. A team looks overstaffed until a wave of attrition hits. A leadership layer looks unnecessary until you see how the next six months of hiring reshape the group.

A dynamic org chart surfaces all of it: current employees, pending starts from the ATS, and the future-state plan tied to budget.

Instead of stitching this view together manually, you get a single model of the workforce that reflects where the team is today and where it’s already headed. That level of visibility is what makes proactive org design possible. Because you’re not just looking at the present, you’re designing for the organization that’s already in motion.

4. Organizational design and structure should be multi-dimensional

Modern organizations don’t fit into neat, single-threaded headcount reporting lines anymore. Teams ship product cross-functionally, leaders oversee multiple capability areas, and employees often contribute to initiatives that don’t map cleanly to their “official” home.

“The chart shows one version of the org. The work shows another. If you only design for the chart, you under-design for reality.” — Somrat Niyogi

To design effectively, People and Talent teams need to see the org from multiple angles at once. That includes views like:

• Skill or capability groupings
• Project teams and initiative-based clusters
• Location and region
• Leveling, compensation bands, or span-of-control overlays
• Cross-functional dotted-line relationships

Traditional org chart software flattens all of this into a single hierarchy. A dynamic system does the opposite. It lets you filter, pivot, and inspect the org through whichever dimension matters in the moment. TeamOhana’s Dynamic Org Chart supports these sliced views so leaders can design structures that match the way work gets done, not just the way boxes stack on a page.

5. The org design process must flow directly into execution

This is where most org designs fall apart. The structure looks solid in planning, but the moment hiring kicks off, the design drifts. The ATS shows a different set of roles, Finance tracks a different version of the plan, and managers adjust things informally as real-world needs surface. By the time you revisit the org, the “planned” version and the “actual” version barely resemble each other.

When design flows straight into execution, the plan becomes the operational system:

• The roles you approve become the roles created in the ATS.
• The compensation and leveling decisions you make stay tied to the budget envelope.
• Every hiring update syncs back into the model in real time.

That’s the point of using a dynamic org chart as the backbone. In TeamOhana, structures, roles, and approvals become the source of truth that hiring managers, Talent, and Finance act on. The plan you design is the plan that gets executed, without the drift that usually appears the moment spreadsheets enter the process.

6. Governance and compliance should be built into good org design processes

A well-designed org only works if people follow it. But when anyone can adjust structure in a spreadsheet, move roles around informally, or open new reqs without visibility, the org stops being a design and becomes a set of guesses.

Good org design needs governance baked in from the start. Not as bureaucracy, but as shared discipline:

• Approvals that ensure structural changes and new roles map back to strategy.
• Audit trails that show who changed what and why, so leaders can operate with confidence.
• Role-based permissions that let everyone collaborate without exposing sensitive compensation or future-state plans.

This is what turns org design into a collaborative practice instead of a back-office exercise. People, Talent, Finance, and hiring managers can all work in the same system at the same time, without breaking anything or creating new versions of the truth.

The value of a dynamic org chart isn’t just visibility. It’s governance. In TeamOhana, every structural decision becomes an approved, trackable, permissioned action. That’s what keeps the org intact as it scales.

How IonQ modernized org design with TeamOhana’s Dynamic Org Chart and headcount planning

IonQ’s growth exposed the fact that the “org chart” didn’t match the organization it was meant to represent. Structure lived in slide decks. Headcount lived in spreadsheets. Hiring progress lived in the ATS. None of it lined up, and leaders spent hours reconciling versions just to understand what their teams actually looked like.

“It was always wrong. The more we dug into the sheets, the more we found mistakes.” — Jessica Hocken Allen, Finance Business Partner

For VP Engineering Dean Kassman, that mismatch made thoughtful org design almost impossible. He couldn’t evaluate span of control, plan future capabilities, or adjust his structure when new initiatives surfaced because there was no single, accurate view of current, pending, and planned headcount.

IonQ implemented TeamOhana to solve these issues. The Dynamic Org Chart gave leaders one real-time view of the entire organization. Not just who was in-seat today, but who was starting, who was approved, and how those changes reshaped the structure.

“I can get a quick view of other leaders’ plans and suggest swaps when it makes sense.” — Dean Kassman, VP Engineering

The impact on org design was immediate:

• Leaders could model reporting lines and leveling decisions with accurate, up-to-date data.
• Structural conversations shifted from reactive cleanup to proactive planning.
• Cross-functional teams collaborated directly on org changes with clear governance and audit trails.
• Span-of-control issues, capability gaps, and future-state needs surfaced early — before they created downstream problems.

IonQ didn’t just speed up planning; they improved the quality of structural decisions. They’re a great example of how modern org design only works when structure, budget, and execution live in one dynamic, continuously updated system.

Design the org you actually need and keep it aligned as you grow

The companies that get org design right aren’t relying on static charts, scattered spreadsheets, or tribal knowledge. They’re operating from one dynamic model of the organization that reflects real structure, real hiring progress, and real budget impact in real time. That’s what turns org design from a periodic clean-up exercise into an ongoing strategic capability.

When People and Talent teams can see the full picture, collaborate in one place, and adjust structure as fast as the business evolves, everything moves faster: decision-making, hiring, execution, and ultimately, growth.

If you want to build an organization that stays aligned long after the planning meeting ends, book a demo and see how TeamOhana can help.