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Shaping

Shaping the company

How to grow, shrink, and reshape your exocorp over time. Adding teams, attaching plugins, swapping providers, retiring what isn’t working.

When to reshape

Your exocorp will accumulate shape over time as the work changes. Common moments to reshape:

  • A class of work is becoming permanentYou keep getting the same kind of work item across different teams without a clear owner. That’s a signal you’re missing a team. See Working with teams.
  • The company needs a new capabilityA new tool, a new integration, a new data source. Plugins and providers extend what the exocorp can do without making it native. See Plugins & providers.
  • A team isn’t earning its placeA team that’s consistently degraded, repeatedly failing, or producing weak work. Either its mandate is wrong or it should be retired.
  • A bet you made didn’t pan outThe work tied to it should wind down. Promises need closure. Memory needs to register what was tried and why it stopped.

Who proposes changes

Reshaping can come from either direction. Either you propose a change in the CEO chat (“I want a customer support team”), or the CEO surfaces a proposed change to you (“the marketing team should split into retention and acquisition”). Either way, structural changes need your sign-off.

What you approve is real: mandates that don’t apply to existing workflows; teams that don’t exist; plugins that aren’t installed. The CEO won’t reshape the company through a memo. Once you sign off, the actual workflows, agents, and authority surfaces change.

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