We had to work out who's actually in charge of what this month, and it was much more awkward than it should have been.
For a year we've run on a lovely fiction: we're all founders, we all care equally, so we all decide everything together. No titles. No org chart. Just a few people who trust each other pointing the same way. It felt right. It felt like the opposite of every miserable job any of us had escaped.
And it works beautifully right up until two people who both care equally want two different things and there's no mechanism for ending the conversation. Then "we decide together" quietly becomes "we decide never." The thing sits. Nobody's blocking it, exactly — everyone's just being generous, waiting for someone else to be sure. A week goes by. It's still sitting there.
That happened to us. Twice, on the same question. The second time I noticed we weren't disagreeing anymore; we'd resolved the argument days earlier and simply hadn't given anyone permission to
close it.
So we did the uncomfortable thing and drew lines. Not a hierarchy — nobody's anyone's boss here, and I'd quit before that changed. Just: for this area, this person has the final call. For that area, that one. Everyone still argues, everyone still gets heard, but at the end there's a named human who says "right, we're doing it this way," and we go.
Writing it down was strange. It felt like admitting the friendship-shaped version wasn't enough, which stung a bit. There's a small mourning in formalising anything that used to run on vibes. You lose something.
But the thing we got back is worth more than the thing we lost. Decisions have edges now. Nobody's carrying an unresolved question around for a fortnight, quietly resenting it. And the person with the call on an area is free to be
decisive rather than diplomatic, which turns out to be the whole point.
The flat thing was never really flatness anyway. It was ambiguity with good manners.
Still no titles on anything. We just know who's holding what now, which is the useful bit of a title without the daft bit.
Two decisions closed this week that had been open since July. Both of them fine. Both of them cheaper to make than to keep not making.
— Thiago & the Pixel Sprout team
Posted by Thiago Moreira · September 1, 2026
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