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Product SchoolSquare Global Head of Product on Why $49B Company Got Rid of General Managers | Willem Avé
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
How Square rebuilt org design and AI to empower sellers
- Willem Avé explained that Square/Block reorganized from a general-management business-unit structure into a fully functional model to improve domain excellence while keeping teams focused on customer outcomes.
- He outlined Square’s product organization across audiences (vertical verticals), platform (with responsibility for product surfaces), growth, and money, with hardware as a sister organization that must be tightly integrated with software.
- He described the DRI approach as a mechanism to prevent “silent vetoes” and slow decisions by empowering a single accountable person to drive a product from ideation through go-to-market and scaling.
- He argued AI can encode institutional knowledge outside the org chart, enabling smaller, more autonomous teams while preserving the need for strong people managers focused on career development.
- He demonstrated “Manager Bot” as an example of AI that creates business-specific artifacts and insights, aiming to help sellers do real work inside their existing workflows rather than adding effort through generic chat output.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasSquare shifted from business units to a fully functional org to strengthen craft and customer outcomes.
He said Square/Block moved away from a business-unit general-management model because it reduced function-specific “craft and excellence,” and the company wanted to lean into functional excellence while keeping teams oriented around customer outcomes.
Square organizes product around audiences, platform-with-surfaces, growth, and money to stay close to outcomes.
He described Square’s product org as centered on being close to customer outcomes, with groups for audiences (verticals), a core platform that also owns product surfaces to avoid generic “one-size-fits-none,” plus growth and money teams; hardware sits as a sister org.
Delightful hardware products require tight hardware–software integration, not separation.
He emphasized hardware’s real-world presence in businesses and argued great experiences require “marrying” software and hardware form factors rather than treating them as separate, which he said is why commodity/off-the-shelf hardware makes excellence hard.
The DRI model is designed to cut through silent vetoes and speed end-to-end execution.
He framed DRI as a way to reduce slow decision-making and “silent vetoes” by empowering an individual to drive decisions across the full arc from ideation through go-to-market and scaling, synthesizing product, technology, and business.
AI can shift “knowledge” from org charts into tools, enabling flatter, faster teams without eliminating management.
He argued org structures historically existed to manage information flow, but modern AI can encode organizational knowledge in tools/agents so teams don’t need to “play telephone,” enabling small autonomous teams—while still requiring strong people managers for career growth.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesHardware must be approachable, must be easy to use, it must be completely delightful, and doing so is not easy.
— Willem Avé
The DRI model is really meant to cut through decision-making and effectively empower a person and an individual to see that decision-making through the entire life cycle of building, building that, that, that product or solution.
— Willem Avé
I think, though, AI gives us the ability to encode that knowledge at another layer. It doesn't have to be encoded in the org entirely. It can be encoded in data that agents have access to, and that really democratizes decision-making.
— Willem Avé
Running a business is, is, is difficult, and it's not difficult for, like, the most obvious reason.
— Willem Avé
My, my hot take on TAM is that I think with the right team, with the right idea, and the right kind of learning loop, your TAM is almost infinite.
— Willem Avé
SPEAKERS
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia
hostCEO at Product School and host of The Product Podcast.
Willem Avé
guestGlobal Head of Product at Square (Block), leading product for the Square brand.
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
