Award-winning salary system
How do you pay people fairly in a company with no managers to decide it? I was in the working group from day one and originated the core ideas of the answer.
Not every system I have built is software. Liip is a self-organizing company running on Holacracy — roughly 250 people, no managers in the traditional sense, and therefore nobody in the traditional position to decide what anyone earns. That is a genuinely hard design problem, and the usual answers are either a secret spreadsheet or a rigid grid nobody believes in.
I was in the working group from day one and originated the core ideas of what we built (one of them later split slightly in the final design). It went on to win the Swiss HR Award 2022 in the category Diversity, Inclusion & Equality. The number that matters more to me: salary satisfaction across the company rose from 82% to 97%.
The reason I put an organizational project on a page full of platforms is that I do not think of them as different work. A salary system is an architecture — it has inputs, invariants, failure modes and incentives, and it will be gamed if you design it carelessly. Getting it right takes the same care as a multi-region cluster, and it affects people rather more directly.
The same body of knowledge is what drove a Kanban transformation at Teleboy, Liip’s Holacracy transition, and the work I still do today: being the person professional consultants call in when one of their hardest organizational cases gets stuck.