The Product Guild

Motivation 

The types of products that teams can make are constrained by the organizational structures those teams take. The C-Corp structure rests on old assumptions about work, labor markets, and creative processes. Can we create a wider diversity of coordination structures so that more types of products can be built? Product Guilds could fill this gap.

Many open source projects, tools and utilities, events, and one-off apps are already built in similar ways. Formalizing them could make them faster and easier to spin up. 

If more “guilds” can quickly spring into existence, then more types of orgs and products could be built, increasing the diversity and speed of tech development. 

Background assumptions of typical C-Corporations 

What are the assumptions of typical company structures, and how are those assumptions changing? 

• Single-track, full-time

  • People have one job that they do for multiple years

• Corporate Parenting 

  • The company provides everything: healthcare, lunch

  • Healthcare, benefits, and auxiliary services

  • Professional development and training

This results an Inefficient Labor Market

The outcomes of the Single Corporate Parenting model: 

• High-skilled individuals locked into single roles

• Underutilization of expertise that could benefit multiple organizations

• Limited ability to rapidly form and dissolve teams

• Friction in matching talent to opportunities

Why now? 

Small teams can do increasingly more engineering, content creation, outbound sales, etc with AI tools. There are increasingly large and liquid global labor markets (ie Turing.com).

What are the building blocks of a Product Guild? 

We could see the emergence of repeat, serial guild-founders and a growing network of builders, developers, and researchers who move between them. 

Technical infrastructure

• One-click company formation

• Automated payments, compliance, reporting, etc 

Financial Infrastructure

• Rapid equity vesting mechanisms (days or months, instead of years) 

• Performance-based compensation 

• Partially eg 10% awarded from bonuses from teammate reviews 

• Retroactive grants 

Social Infrastructure

• Reputation and skill verification system

• Distribution and marketing networks for repeated distribution to consumers or businesses 

Guild Leadership 

There needs to be a leader committed to the project for its lifetime to liquidity. For conventional products, this is usually at least a year. 

Next steps

Small teams have increasing leverage to do engineering, design, content creation and operations. The combination of these new tools and fluid org structures could enable a dramatic increase in novel product creation. 

Product guilds provide an alternative along the spectrum of traditional locked-in employment relationships and fully transactional contract work platforms. At its best, a product guild might provide the flexibility and agility of contract work, with the stability and shared upside of a traditional startup.