Who is who
The Org Chart Is Not the Map
An organisation chart records reporting lines accurately and tells you almost nothing about who you will actually need.
What the people on this page had to find out, and where from
Who signs off a schema change
you asked4Three people were asked before the right one
That two people on the team do not speak to each other
worked out11Worked out from who was never on the same call
two things you had to know · nobody told you any of them · the median arrived in week 11 · all two you went and got
Two facts about the shape of a team, neither of which appears on any chart and neither of which anybody would have said out loud.
Where a new hire is working across several projects, teams can explore the software to make workload and handoffs visible before confusion becomes performance debt.
New employees and managers can compare this approach with guidance available from Fair Work Ombudsman.
Everybody on the formal chart against everybody who turned out to matter
Introduced, and never needed · 4
- Your manager's manager — met in week 1
- The head of people — met in week 1
- A director from another division — met in week 1
- A finance manager — met in week 1
Introduced, and needed · 2
- Your own manager — met in before you started; needed in week 1
- The two others on your team — met in week 1; needed in week 1
Needed, and never introduced · 4
- The person who runs the release — needed in week 2. Found by reading the channel history
- Whoever owns the billing dashboard — needed in week 3. Found by asking in a channel and waiting two days
- The person who actually approves schema changes — needed in week 4. Found on the fourth attempt, after asking three wrong people
ten people · six you were introduced to · six you actually needed · four you had to find yourself
Ten people. Six were introduced to you and four were not; of the six, four were never needed again after the welcome call. The chart was accurate and it was not a map. One person's own twelve weeks. +1 further person not shown.
The chart you are shown in week one is accurate. It records who reports to whom, and that is a real and sometimes useful fact.
It is not a map of who you will need, and it was never meant to be. Confusing the two is how new people spend their first month talking to the wrong people.
What the chart gets right
Reporting lines, which matter for a small number of things: who decides your objectives, who signs your holiday, who you escalate to if something goes seriously wrong.
That is roughly three facts, and they are all about you rather than about the work.
What it leaves out
Who actually knows things. Knowledge sits with whoever built a thing, not with whoever currently owns it. The person who wrote the import pipeline may have moved teams a year ago and will still answer questions about it faster than anybody.
Who owns what, as opposed to who manages whom. A title says "Platform Engineer" and tells you nothing about which of eleven systems that person is the one to ask about.
Where decisions actually happen. Covered in its own note later. The short version: there is usually a meeting, and it is usually not the one with the decision-sounding name.
Who is quick. The most practical fact about any colleague and the one you can only discover by asking them something.
Building the real map
Not by studying the chart. By three methods, in order of how much they yield.
Reading history. Who has touched the thing you are working on? Whose name is on the last five changes, the last five documents, the last five decisions? That is your list, and it is accurate because it is a record of behaviour rather than of structure.
Asking. "Who should I talk to about X?" answered by three different people converges quickly, and the convergence is the information.
Noticing who answers. Over a fortnight in any team channel, four or five names account for most of the answers. They are not necessarily senior and they are the people who will determine how your first quarter goes.
The three wrong people
In the panel above, finding the person who approves schema changes took four attempts.
That is normal and it is worth expecting, because the first three answers you get to "who owns this?" will often be somebody's best guess. Nobody is misleading you; they genuinely do not know, because they have never needed to.
What makes the fourth attempt work is asking differently:
Who was the last person to approve one of these? I do not need the owner, just somebody who has actually done it.
A question about who did it last has a findable answer. A question about ownership frequently does not.
What to do with the chart you were given
Keep it, and use it for exactly what it is good for: remembering that the person you spoke to on Tuesday sits in the other division, and knowing roughly how far away from your work a given name is.
Then build your own list beside it. That list is the subject of the last note in this section, and it is the single most useful document a new person keeps.
The people on the chart you will never need
Half of them, roughly, and that is not a criticism of anybody.
A welcome call with the head of people, your manager's manager and a director from another division is hospitality, and it is given to every joiner. It establishes that you exist. It does not give you anybody you will work with, and it is worth not mistaking the one for the other in week two, when the absence of useful contacts can feel like being ignored.
The chart is useful for exactly one thing
Knowing how far away somebody is.
When you are about to write to a stranger, the chart tells you whether they are in your division, two teams over, or in a different part of the company entirely. That changes the message: a colleague in the adjacent team gets two sentences, and somebody four levels away in another function gets three, one of which explains who you are.
It also tells you who will see a reply. A question sent to somebody whose manager sits above your manager is a question with an audience, and that is worth knowing before you phrase it.
Beyond those two uses, put it away. The map you need is built from the history of the work, and the note on finding people describes how.