I spent 10 years building and working inside engineering teams in ecommerce. When I started looking at agencies from the outside, as someone exploring acquisitions, I expected things to feel unfamiliar.
What I found was the opposite. The structure was almost identical, just with different job titles.
The roles map almost perfectly
Once you strip away the labels, the functions are the same.
Product Manager becomes Account Manager. Owns the client relationship, prioritises work, translates business needs into tasks the team can execute.
Engineering Manager becomes Operations Lead. Keeps the machine running. Manages capacity, workflow, delivery timelines and team health.
Lead Software Engineer becomes Senior Strategist. The technical authority. Sets direction, reviews quality, mentors the juniors and makes the calls on approach.
Software Engineers become the specialists. CRO analysts, UX researchers, data analysts, developers. The people doing the hands-on work that produces the output.
The naming is different but the responsibilities, the dependencies between roles and the way work flows through the team are surprisingly close.
What engineering calls a "pod"
In software, the best teams are organised into pods. A pod is a small, cross-functional group that owns a specific outcome end to end. They have everything they need inside the unit to deliver without waiting on other teams.
The interesting thing is that the best agencies I've spoken to run the same way without calling it that. A senior strategist, an analyst, a designer and an account manager working together on a set of clients, self-contained and accountable to results, not just tasks. They don't hand work off across departments, they own the full delivery.
The agencies that struggle tend to look different. Work gets passed between departments. Nobody owns the outcome. The founder is the glue holding it together, which means the founder is also the bottleneck.
The ones that scale do this on purpose
The agencies that break past the plateau, the ones that grow beyond the founder's personal capacity, almost always have some version of pod structure in place. They might not call it that. They might call it client teams or squads or just "how we work." But the principle is the same: small, autonomous groups with clear ownership.
The ones that don't have this tend to hit a ceiling somewhere between 5 and 15 people. Everything runs through one or two senior people, and growth means more chaos, not more capacity.
Why this is the first thing I look for
When I evaluate an agency, whether as a potential acquisition or just to understand how it operates, this is my starting point. How is the team structured? Is there clear ownership? Can this business deliver without the founder in every conversation?
If the answer is pods, or something close to it, I know the business has a foundation that can scale. When it's a talented founder holding everything together with no structure underneath, that's not necessarily bad, but it's a very different situation to work with.
If you run an agency, I'm curious: does this map to how your team works? Reply and tell me. I might be completely wrong.
Speak soon,
Jordan
