The art and wisdom of changing teams | Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming)

**Heidi Helfand** (0:00)
Reteaming is hard, reorgs are hard.
You can't lump them all into one thing with, you know, oh, it's all great all the time. No, it's not.
If we could just build the software, deliver to the customer, get the product market fit. Hey, have we delighted them or not? If only it could be that easy. No, we have the people there. So let's focus there too.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:25)
Today my guest is Heidi Helfand. After two decades in the tech industry, Heidi became fascinated with how teams are organized, how org structures change, and how to set teams up for success through that change. She now teaches workshops and runs courses and consults on how to effectively reorganize your teams.
In her book, Dynamic Reteaming, Heidi delves deep into why change is actually good for your teams, why you're better off not having super stable teams, how to effectively execute reorgs, and through that, how to reduce attrition, stagnation, and knowledge silos. In our conversation, Heidi shares the five types of reteaming, anti-patterns to void when making org changes, what sort of team structure is most conducive to creating totally new products, why being transparent about your reorg plans is definitely worth considering, also how Heidi became such a great listener with a lot of really interesting insights and advice there, and so much more. Huge thank you to John Cutler for introducing me to Heidi. With that, I bring you Heidi Helfand after a short word from our sponsors.
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Heidi, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Heidi Helfand** (3:44)
Thanks, Lenny. Great to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:46)
It's great to have you here. So, I had this colleague at Airbnb. Her name was Jana, and she always had this joke that she shared that if it's been six months and she hasn't switched teams or hasn't moved desks, she knew there was this re-org coming. There's something happening. Something was coming to change everything.
And, you wrote a whole book about this general idea of teams changing re-orgs. You call it re-teaming. I have the book right here, it's called Dynamic Reteaming, The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams. I feel like just people underestimate the opportunities and benefits of change, and I think they always see it as a scary thing. So, I'm really excited to spend time with you and chat about this topic.
Before we get into the meat of it, I'm just curious why you decided to spend so much of your time researching this area of team change, reorgs, reteaming.

**Heidi Helfand** (4:34)
Yeah, that's a good question. It wasn't necessarily planned.
I had been working in a variety of different fast-growing startups for most of my career, in like 20 years in software as a service companies in particular. And I read a lot of books to try to get better at my work and what we're doing in our teams. I have a lot right over there, as you can see. And a lot of the books I would read on teams and the advice that I would get from people would be, you know, you really want to keep your teams the same. You want to go for that forming, storming, norming, performing kind of thing. And I had thought about that and I was like, wait, well, it wasn't really possible for us. When I was at a startup and I was the 10th employee and we grew to 900 people and now thousands of people, our teams kind of morphed and changed.