# Snap pairs a small, flat design team with a scaled operation

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/snap-pairs-a-small-flat-design-team-with-a-scaled-operation/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Evan Spiegel](https://realalpha.app/people/evan-spiegel/) · Evan Spiegel is co-founder and CEO of Snap. · Co-founded Snapchat at Stanford and has led Snap as CEO since 2011, building Stories and the Specs AR glasses.
- Host: [Lenny Rachitsky](https://realalpha.app/people/lenny-rachitsky/) · Host, Lenny's Podcast · Spent seven years at Airbnb; his product newsletter has over 1M subscribers.
- Show: Lenny's Podcast
- Episode: [How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO)](https://realalpha.app/v/-7Yol5vX5xw/), Apr 26, 2026
- Moment: 17:52 to 21:42 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/snap-pairs-a-small-flat-design-team-with-a-scaled-operation/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/-7Yol5vX5xw/?t=1072

## Quote

> “if you want to **deliver a product at scale**, you usually need quite a large organization.”
> — [Evan Spiegel](https://realalpha.app/people/evan-spiegel/) at [18:38](https://realalpha.app/v/-7Yol5vX5xw/?t=1118) · Lenny's Podcast

## Takeaways

1. Large operations need structure and reliability.
2. Flat teams can experiment and fail quickly.
3. Leaders must build mutual respect between the two.

## About this segment

Evan Spiegel describes how Snap balances a structured company with a 9-to-12-person design team that can take risks. Ongoing dialogue between the groups helps ideas reach customers reliably.

From “How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO)”, Apr 26, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/-7Yol5vX5xw/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[18:01](https://realalpha.app/v/-7Yol5vX5xw/?t=1081) always been punching above its weight in terms of just how much new stuff comes out of your team, how many inventions happen considering the size of the company and the history. What do you find needs to be true for innovation to happen? What do you do to allow for all these great ideas to emerge. The best sort of like academic overview or summary, I think, comes from a guy, Safi Bacall, who wrote a book called Loon Shots. It's really worth reading. It's all about the innovation process. And actually, when I read it, I was like, oh, my gosh, that kind of explains a lot of how we think about innovation at Snap. And I think to summarize the academic version, we can talk about like what we've developed and built at Snap. But like to summarize, you know, essentially his findings are that basically, if you want to deliver a product at scale, you usually need

[18:52](https://realalpha.app/v/-7Yol5vX5xw/?t=1132) quite a large organization. A large organization needs hierarchy and structure, a lot of operational rigor. And as soon as you have an organization that's very large and very structured like that, people become very focused on getting a promotion, getting into the next step of the hierarchy. And that means that all of a sudden, they become a lot more risk averse. They're not really as willing to try new things. They're very focused on, you know, achieving the goals that have sort of been set for them in this operational hierarchy. And that is that makes it very, very challenging to innovate. Now, on the flip side, you know, structures that are really healthy and constructive for innovation, you know, typically are very, very flat. Right. That's the same for our design team, for example, where there's no one that has a fancier title or a role. There's a lot of

[19:40](https://realalpha.app/v/-7Yol5vX5xw/?t=1180) flexibility in terms of the ability to try new things and fail quickly and put up crazy ideas. And what he basically finds is that the companies that are very successful actually have both types of organizations inside their company and that the leaders of the organization are the ones who are responsible for creating a healthy functioning. relationship between the two types of organizations, because what ends up happening in a lot of companies is that, you know, the small innovative team becomes critical of the large, you know, organization. Oh, they're so bureaucratic and slow. They don't innovate, you know, things like that. And then the, you know, the, the larger organization is like, oh, you know, what are these jokers doing? You know, just innovating. They're not really driving the business. They're

[20:21](https://realalpha.app/v/-7Yol5vX5xw/?t=1221) not supporting our customers. And so a lot of tension actually arises from the different organizational structures. And so the leadership responsibility, and I think, you know, Safi does a really good job looking throughout history, what leaders have cultivated really constructive and powerful relationships between the more innovative or flat parts of the organization and the more structured and hierarchical parts of the organization.

[20:46](https://realalpha.app/v/-7Yol5vX5xw/?t=1246) How you create that mutual respect, how you create that dialogue between those parts of the organization is so important. And so when I read that, I was like, wow, that actually sounds quite similar to what we have at Snap. You know, we have to run a large public company, serve almost a billion customers. That means, you know, our service needs to be really reliable. It means that we need to operate, you know, really, really effectively to serve our customers.

[21:07](https://realalpha.app/v/-7Yol5vX5xw/?t=1267) And at the same time, we have a very, very small, you know, it sort of oscillates between like nine and 12 people design team that is constantly innovating and creating new things. And I think, you know, the beauty of what I love about Snap is that the dialogue between those two teams is where a lot of that innovation happens. Because a lot of our engineers, you know, working to serve our customers or working on reliability have a bunch of great ideas and so do our designers.

[21:31](https://realalpha.app/v/-7Yol5vX5xw/?t=1291) And as long as they're in dialogue, you know, really great things can happen.