Like many engineering organisations, the ones I have led have generally started out organised by function rather than outcome: engineering, product, and QA as separate groups, with hand-offs between them to ship a feature. That shape makes ownership hard to place, and it leaves teams without a shared operating model to work from. I wanted to change it, and I wanted the change to be structural rather than cosmetic.
What is the unFix model? Link to heading
The unFix model was created by Jurgen Appelo as a crew-based organisational framework. Its premise is that organisations should maximise team autonomy and minimise hand-offs, within clear strategic direction from leadership.
The central unit is the Crew: a small, cross-functional group with clear ownership of a product, platform, service, or specialist capability. unFix defines several Crew types, each with a distinct purpose:
| Crew Type | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Governance Crew | Sets vision, strategy, and constraints |
| Value Stream Crew | End-to-end ownership of a product or service |
| Platform Crew | Shared services and infrastructure, treating internal Crews as customers |
| Capability Crew | Specialist skills, embedded in Value Stream Crews on demand |
| Facilitation Crew | Helps other Crews work effectively: process, tooling, coaching |
| Experience Crew | Holds the cross-product customer view |
| Partnership Crew | Manages critical external relationships |
Why unFix? Link to heading
Several things made unFix the right choice.
A vocabulary for the structure I wanted. Crew types gave precise language for distinctions that previously had to be explained from scratch: the difference between an architecture capability and a QA function, or between product strategy and a product crew’s ownership of delivery. Shared terminology accelerates every conversation about how to organise.
Explicit autonomy as a first-class principle. Rather than autonomy being an aspiration overridden by process, unFix builds it in structurally. Crews own their sprint commitments, self-organise their ways of working, and manage their own ceremonies and tooling choices within agreed constraints. Work is assigned to Crews, not individuals.
A model for specialist skills that avoids the bottleneck problem. The Capability Crew solves a problem most engineering organisations struggle with: specialists are expensive to distribute across every team, but centralising them creates queues. The unFix answer is that the specialist embeds in the Crew for the duration of the work. No queue. No hand-off. The Crew retains ownership throughout.
A governance model that matched how I wanted to lead. The Governance Crew is a cross-organisational, consensus-based body, not a command-and-control hierarchy. It sets direction and makes cross-cutting decisions. It does not manage the day-to-day work of individual Crews.
The structure I landed on Link to heading
I use most of the Crew types. Value Stream Crews own delivery end-to-end for each product area. Platform Crews own shared infrastructure, treating internal Crews as their customers. Capability Crews provide specialist skills on an embedded model. Facilitation Crews own shared practices, process, and tooling.
Escalation from Crews to Governance is reserved for genuine blockers, not routine co-ordination. Crews negotiate dependencies directly with each other. That is a real change from how things usually work.
How I implemented it Link to heading
I started with documentation: not just an org chart, but explanatory material. What each Crew type means, how it applies in practice, and what each Crew’s brief is. The goal was that any engineer in the organisation could read it and understand both the framework and the specific choices I had made.
Then Crew formation and Captain appointments. A Captain in unFix is not a manager. They are the primary point of accountability within the Crew for the work the Crew owns. Appointments were consultative: engineers were approached individually and asked whether they wanted the role, not told they were being given it.
The structure is in place. The ways of working are still settling. More on that to come.