Can we stop using emails, please?
Today, large teams form out of partnerships, subcontractors, alliances, and vendors combined with internal teams.
However, the projects that succeed—those that deliver on time and budget without exhausting everyone—don’t operate this way.
They work well because they manage to function as one team, regardless of who pays the bills. They close the communication gaps.
The Alliance Model
Finland’s alliance model is a great example. Major infrastructure projects like hospitals, rail lines, and highways are delivered by alliances of public bodies, contractors, and consultants. A new company is effectively made that brings all the vendors under one governing body.
There’s one budget, not separate ones
Risks and rewards are shared
Everyone operates under one steering group
Targets are collective, not divided
Despite the mix of company logos, it works. Why? Because people and companies act like they’re on the same team. Design decisions don’t stall over “someone else’s scope.” People can communicate with each other directly. People resolve issues in one "virtual room" instead of ten. It’s not vertical integration in structure—but it is in behavior. The behavior is exactly what matters.
Tesla: Owning the Stack to Move Fast
Albeit Tesla is currently unpopular, it is worth the case study for its significant impact to the car making industry.
They,
Build their own batteries
Write their own software with an inhouse software team
Sell cars directly to consumers
Manage its own factories, logistics, and service centers
Take care of all the charging infrastructure
Basically, brought back something known as vertical integration.
They found this way to organize because they found it first hand, that you cannot move fast when you outsource critical parts. The problem with outsourcing is that it creates a an infinite web of communication gaps that slow everything to a crawl. Whenever you add a company, you tend to add an email gap.
Spoiler: Email gaps do not work.
VW’s CARIAD: A Tesla Reaction
Volkswagen started its own software company, CARIAD, after seeing Tesla’s speed. At the time, CEO Herbert Diess openly stated that Tesla was their benchmark. CARIAD's aim was to create a unified software platform for all VW brands.
It had difficulties but was going in the right direction. They realized that outsourcing critical systems hurt their competitiveness.
The key problem is that coordinating 150 different vendors to come together to produce something unified is almost impossible, and to the dismay of car users everywhere, the infotainment systems on this planet today are ample proof of that in that they are more or less terrible. Only lately, due to the reorganization of most companies into unified efforts, they are becoming tolerable.
The key here is:
When you move from using emails to coordinate, to people actually working together, regardless of company - the good outcomes follow.
Platform Engineering
I have seen it first hand in software consultancy, that the customer orders a complex software system that has a multi-vendor setup. Because no effort is taken to organize the meta-effort of “how we do the work”, the whole suffers. These problems manifest as:
No idea who owns what
Having to scour teams or emails to find an owner
No idea who makes a change
When is the change coming
What informs the change, does it include all the relevant dependencies
Teams have every type of tool to solve the same problem
There’s silos that inform each other via email
Developers waste all their time on finding information
The key is, when any software is made, you need to think about how the day to day is going to run. How does X contact Y, who owns X.
The big mistake is to spread ownership in a way that disables the ability for anyone to “see it fix it”, but the opposite is true where you have no ownership and then nobody decides anything.
Scrum won’t help you, if you have 20 scrum teams with no common rules.
Platform engineering is a paradigm that involves creating internal tools and infrastructure that help product teams deliver faster with fewer distractions. Good platform teams do more than just write Terraform modules. They establish clear defaults:
One CI/CD pipeline
One deployment method
Shared observability standards
Pre-configured IAM and access
More importantly, they determine team interfaces:
Who owns what?
What’s automated versus flexible?
What does “done” mean for all products?
How do you ask for changes?
How do you see what the team works on?
They also have a superstructure of common goal setting and coordination
This represents vertical integration within a software organization—not for centralization’s sake but to avoid scattered ownership, unclear tools, and slow feedback loops that hinder progress.
The Common Thread: Act as one
The key problem that I see is the assumption that when starting a new project, no reorganization is needed. You should always start here!
Eliminate gaps between people, decisions, and delivery!
Create environments where:
People can communicate daily, instantly, without going through five layers
Shared backlogs exist
There is full visibility to the whole operation, regardless of company
Decisions are made close to the work, give ownership, empower people
Tools are straightforward and unified
Everyone understands what “success” looks like
Everyone understands why we are doing things
Everyone serves everyone
DO NOT
It goes without saying:
Do not use email for anything in 2025
Align everyone through visual representations of what you want to make
For websites, this is the visual design of the end user site
For cars, this is a concept of the car you are making
Do not let the limitations of systems inform the design of your end user content
If the backend systems and their technical limitations informs the rest of what your company does, prepare to fail to serve your customers
Use your creativity and figure out a way to side-cart any technical limitations. so that the customer gets what they should
Everyone should have the customer’s needs as their North Star, regardless of if they work on the APIs or the architecture of a completely unrelated system
No one should be designing an architecture or a backend system without having seen what they serve with that backend system.
A visual representation is a great way to achieve this - always tie the design back to a single design artifact across the organization.
The people who work on a feature together, should work together
If a feature requires people from 3 companies, start by having those people work together, sync together and have dailies together.
Essentially:
Communication gaps must be deleted
Communication must be nearly instant
No emails
Final Note: You Don’t Need to Own It All—Just Act Like You Do
You don’t have to literally reorganize how your company is structured. However, if you want to succeed in complex projects, you must integrate how your people work. Share goals, feedback loops, and missions. Bring people from different companies under one banner. Remove communication gaps.
The quicker you close the gaps between roles, vendors, departments, and platforms, the faster you’ll move.
Low hanging fruit: Start with having all of the people who do your stuff, in the same Slack! Use the best tool for communication and make sure that that tool is good!
If the people are in the same virtual room, tackling problems as they arise, you will deliver. If they are sending messages across organizational charts, pursuing contracts, or stuck in endless alignment meetings, you won’t.