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Cadence OneFive° Handbook

Horizontal Practices

We’re a self-managing team. No supervisors, no micromanagement - you own your work and you’re accountable to your teammates.

Outside of work, nobody supervises you, yet you make important decisions for yourself and people you care about. We believe you can do the same at work. Better, even, because you’re working with a team of smart people who support each other.

How This Works

Section titled “How This Works”

We use horizontal practices because we believe in treating adults like adults. You have the most information about whether you’re doing your best work. You’ve thought more deeply about what you’re doing than anyone else has. So you should make the key decisions about your work.

At the same time, what you do affects teammates who depend on you. So we have practices that help you balance working autonomously with meeting the needs of people whose work depends on you.

Quick Definitions

Section titled “Quick Definitions”
  • Manager of One: You own your work and growth autonomously - no one micromanages you. You’re accountable to your teammates for outcomes and it’s part of your job to help them succeed.
  • Consent Process: How we make decisions that affect others (see below)
  • Safe to Try: We can recover from this if it doesn’t work
  • Worth Trying: This is a good use of our limited resources
Section titled “The Core: Consent Process”

At Cadence OneFive, we use one decision-making pattern for almost everything: the Consent Process.

Use it for:

  • Your quarterly workplan
  • Hiring decisions
  • Feature prioritization
  • Budget requests
  • Process changes
  • Anything that affects others’ work

The goal: Find what’s worth trying AND safe to try.

See How We Make Decisions for the full guide.

Why Horizontal?

Section titled “Why Horizontal?”

Most companies believe hierarchical management is necessary to “manage performance” - someone “above” you must hold you accountable. The history behind this idea treats workers like cogs in a machine, ignoring intrinsic motivation.

In our experience, the best work happens when you own it.

We think hierarchical management is at best unnecessary and at worst creates a dehumanizing culture, especially for women and other workers underrepresented in tech. So no one here is a supervisor. Everyone is a manager-of-one: autonomous in how you work, accountable to your team for outcomes.

We’re not alone: Companies from WL Gore (GoreTex) to Haier (world’s largest appliance maker), startups like Buffer, and specialists like August have embraced self-management - some for decades.

How We Work

Section titled “How We Work”

  1. You don’t report to a supervisor. You keep yourself accountable and evaluate your own performance.

  2. Personal decisions = your call. Affects only you? Just do it.

  3. Decisions affecting others = consent process. Use it to find what’s worth trying AND safe to try.

  4. Fail in public. Mistakes don’t make you a bad person. Hiding them might kill the company. Share so we can all help and learn.

  5. Ask for help. Be greedy in asking, verbose when struggling, generously honest in giving feedback.

Questions? Join the discussion in your 360 channel, team channel, or #help_general.

What If Things Go Wrong?

Section titled “What If Things Go Wrong?”

In a horizontal org, you might worry: “What if I mess up and there’s no boss to fix it?” Here’s the reality:

When you’re stuck or confused:

  • Ask for help immediately in your 360 channel, team channel, or #please-thanks
  • Call a 360 review meeting—don’t wait for the scheduled one
  • Request a consent process meeting to workshop the problem
  • Your onboarding guide (for new folks) is there for this

When you make a mistake:

  • Share it openly so the team can help
  • Mistakes don’t make you a bad person—hiding them might hurt the company
  • We troubleshoot together, learn, and move on

When a teammate isn’t delivering or relationships are strained:

  • Call a restorative conversation—this IS the structured way to talk directly
  • Call a 360 review if it’s about work performance or work plan alignment
  • Don’t wait or hope it gets better—address it early
  • In rare cases, founders may need to get involved, but peer accountability comes first

The safety net is the TEAM, not a boss.

Our Principles

Section titled “Our Principles”

We embrace clarity. Especially for difficult discussions. We have short toes - no one obfuscates to save face.

People are dynamic. Your interests and strengths change over time. We make room for growth, whether at Cadence OneFive or beyond.

We support the whole person. Help is gifted, not transactional. No favors to be returned.

We don’t coerce. We negotiate and compromise. We use the consent process to agree on what to try, possibly after some healthy conflict. We allow for changing direction based on new data.

Who We Hire

Section titled “Who We Hire”

We hire people who:

  1. Put team success first by supporting autonomous ways of working. Everyone embraces our climate mission. We lift each other up. We communicate.

  2. Dig in and become expert, staying flexible in mindset. Generalists and specialists motivated by learning and curiosity are welcome.

  3. Assume best intentions and give themselves and others permission to fail, recover, and learn.