Stop the Copy-Paste Culture: Why Chapter Leads Are Often Useless

For years, organizations have been blindly adopting "Tribes," "Squads," and "Chapters" from models like Spotify, thinking that a change in terminology equals a change in productivity. We've ended up in a situation where we have a Chapter Lead for Backend, a Chapter Lead for Frontend, and a Chapter Lead for QA—all sitting on top of teams that are already struggling to find a rhythm.

I'm going to be blunt: The dedicated Chapter Lead role is often useless, and it's time to cut it.

# The Problem with "Siloed" Leadership

When you have a Chapter Lead specifically for one discipline, you aren't building a cross-functional culture; you are reinforcing silos.

**Conflict of Interest**: The Chapter Lead is incentivized to focus on discipline-specific "perfection" rather than the actual delivery of the product.

**Communication Overload**: Instead of a team moving as one unit, you now have layers of people who need to be "aligned" across different chapters before a single line of code is pushed to production.

**The Morale Gap**: Developers find themselves answering to multiple masters—an Engineering Manager for their day-to-day work and a Chapter Lead for their "career growth." This creates confusion and slows down decision-making.

# The Strong Recommendation: Rely on the EM

If you want a lean, high-performing organization, you need to simplify. My recommendation is simple but firm: Eliminate the Chapter Lead roles and place the full weight of responsibility on the Engineering Manager (EM).

An Engineering Manager should be more than just a "people person." They should be technical enough to understand the trade-offs across the stack. When the EM owns the team's health, technical growth, and delivery, the feedback loop is closed. There is one point of accountability, one vision, and zero "matrix management" friction.

# Excellence Comes from Practice, Not Titles

"But who will ensure technical standards?" some might ask.

The answer is your Principal Engineers and your Staff Engineers. Technical excellence should be driven by the people doing the work, through RFCs, pair programming, and shared standards—not by a middle manager whose primary job is "aligning" a chapter.

Stop building org charts that look like a Spotify PowerPoint from 2012. Cut the bloat, empower your EMs, and let your engineers build.