The founder of Postman says you have to kill your existing org chart

Ivan Burazin · tweet · 2026-04-10 Reader 🖥️

Coordination Cost Hierarchy & Org Charts Agency Non-Engineers Building Taste & Judgment

Traditional organizational hierarchies must be dismantled in favor of flat, builder-centric structures where everyone — including PMs and designers — ships directly, and management exists to cultivate judgment rather than coordinate through layers.

practical · tweet (summary/commentary on a talk or interview) — This is a tweet thread summarizing and endorsing claims made by Abhinav Asthana (@a85), founder of Postman, about how AI should reshape organizational structure. Ivan Burazin is relaying and amplifying the message. The form constrains depth — these are compressed assertions, not developed arguments.

Structure

Part	Role
Opening claim: kill the pre-AI org chart	Thesis statement — frames the entire thread as a call to action
The modern org chart bullet points (wide span, work with ICs, build or sell)	Prescriptive model — the replacement structure
Staff/principal engineers leading projects	Example of the new leadership model — agency over hierarchy
PMs building APIs and prototyping in Claude; designers shipping PRs through Cursor	Concrete illustrations that traditional role boundaries dissolve when AI tools enable direct building
Everyone is building; management develops judgment	Summary and redefinition of management's purpose

Key terms

org chart Hierarchy & Org Charts
The formal hierarchy of reporting relationships and layers of management that mediate between leadership and individual contributors
wide span of control Hierarchy & Org Charts
Each manager (including executives) oversees many direct reports, minimizing intermediate layers
high agency Agency
The capacity and authority to act autonomously, see broadly across the organization, and drive projects end-to-end without waiting for permission or coordination through management layers
building
Directly producing artifacts (code, prototypes, APIs, designs that ship) as opposed to producing documents, specs, or coordination overhead
judgment Taste & Judgment
The ability to make good decisions about what to build, prioritize, and ship — positioned as management's redefined purpose

Propositions

explicitPre-AI organizational hierarchies are obsolete and must be actively dismantled.conf: high
explicitThe modern org chart requires wide span of control, direct work with ICs, and a binary of building or selling.conf: high
explicitProject leadership should be held by staff/principal engineers who have both breadth and depth.conf: high
explicitAI tools (Claude, Cursor) enable traditionally non-coding roles to ship production artifacts directly.conf: high
explicitManagement's purpose is no longer coordination or oversight but the development of better judgment.conf: high
implicitcontestedMiddle management layers are primarily coordination overhead that AI tools make unnecessary.conf: high
refines ←The engineering manager role is splitting in two · p4 — kill-your-org-chart argues middle-management layers are coordination overhead AI makes unnecessary; Moreau refines this by showing one live future is middle management not vanishing but widening — the multi-team EM at 50:1 — so 'unnecessary' overstates a genuinely contested outcome.
contradicts ←Managers Are Not Overhead: They Are Infrastructure · p2 — This essay's opening statement of the narrative it goes on to rebut is the same claim the Postman-founder essay asserts affirmatively ('Middle management layers are primarily coordination overhead that AI tools make unnecessary') — direct opposition on the same claim.
implicitcorroboratedThe value of PMs and designers was partially blocked by their inability to ship directly; AI tools remove that bottleneck.conf: medium
supports ←The engineering manager role is splitting in two · p2 — Both hold that AI removes the shipping bottleneck for non-coding roles — Moreau's PM who demos a clickable product on Monday is the same mechanism as kill-your-org-chart's claim that AI tools let PMs/designers ship production artifacts directly, dissolving the team's need for coordinating glue.
implicitPRDs and Figma-only workflows are symptoms of the old hierarchy, not intrinsically valuable activities.conf: medium

Arguments

Organizations must flatten their hierarchies and make everyone a builder. strength: medium

Explicit premises:

AI tools enable non-engineers to ship production code and prototypes directly.
The alternative to building is selling — there is no third category of pure coordination.
Staff/principal engineers with high agency can lead projects without management intermediaries.

Implicit premises:

The primary function of middle management layers was coordination and translation between executives and ICs.
AI tools are sufficiently mature and reliable for PMs and designers to ship production-quality work.
What Postman has done internally is generalizable to other organizations.
Speed and directness of execution are the dominant competitive advantages in the AI era.

Inferences:

If everyone can build directly, then coordination layers lose their justification.
If coordination layers are removed, management must find a new purpose (judgment).

Narratives

The transformation at Postman: PMs who used to write PRDs now prototype in Claude; designers who used to hand off Figma files now ship PRs through Cursor.
→ Provides concrete, aspirational examples of role transformation to make the abstract org-chart argument tangible and credible

Questions addressed

✅ How should organizations restructure for the AI era?
Flatten hierarchy, widen span of control, eliminate layers between execs and ICs, make everyone a builder, redefine management as judgment-development.
✅ What happens to PMs and designers in an AI-native org?
They become builders — shipping code, APIs, and PRs directly using AI tools.
⭕ What is management for if not coordination?
Developing better judgment — but this is asserted without elaboration on what that means in practice.

Gaps

unstated assumptionThe argument assumes that coordination, alignment, and context-sharing across teams are either unnecessary or automatically handled in flat structures. Large-scale organizations face coordination problems that are not solely caused by hierarchy but by the inherent complexity of distributed work.
Read next: Literature on coordination costs in flat organizations (e.g., Galbraith's information-processing theory of organization design); case studies of flat-org failures at scale.
missing evidenceNo evidence is provided that PMs building APIs or designers shipping PRs produces better outcomes than the prior division of labor. The implicit claim is that directness equals quality, but this conflates shipping speed with product quality.
Read next: Research on specialization vs. generalization in knowledge work; outcomes data from companies that have adopted these structures.
ambiguity'Management's job is to develop better judgment' is left undefined. Judgment about what? How is it developed? This is the most provocative redefinition in the thread but receives the least elaboration.
Read next: Explore what 'judgment' means operationally — cf. Kahneman on decision quality, or strategic management literature on executive cognition.
closed byAI Is Undermining Leaders’ Judgment. Here’s What to Do About It. — Defines the undefined term directly: judgment is specifically breadth of perception plus independence of interpretation, developed through two named, teachable practices (structured curiosity / CAST and intentional dissent / RED) rather than left as an unelaborated slogan.
selection biasThe argument is attributed to the founder of Postman — a developer-tools company where engineering culture is dominant. The prescription may not transfer to organizations where the core work is not software (healthcare, logistics, manufacturing).
Read next: Compare with AI-era org design thinking in non-tech industries.
unacknowledged tensionThe binary 'either you're building, or you're selling' erases important organizational functions: strategy, research, compliance, people development, customer success. These are neither building nor selling but may be essential.
Read next: Consider which organizational functions are genuinely automatable vs. which are being rhetorically dismissed.