Early Stage SaaS Technical Team Evolution Template

Early stage SaaS technical team org chart template

Below is a fully interactive template. You can navigate around, drill in and even make changes. If you plan to save changes you make, you'll need to create an account with Functionly. If you already have an account, login to Functionly in a different tab, then come back and refresh this page and choose "duplicate scenario" in the template below.

About this template

In a startup, a founder might call themselves the "chief technology officer" (CTO), but in reality, they still wear many hats - from coding to customer support. The CTO might make their first few hires, but the tech team is often small and everyone does a little bit of everything.

But as the startup grows, the tech team under the CTO will need to grow with it. There's likely to be greater specialisation and, eventually, greater spans of control and hierarchy.

In this template, we've built out three different CTO team structures - one for a startup that might just be getting established, one for a maturing startup that's likely generating revenue, and one for a scaling startup that might be on its way to a Series A raise.

In this single scenario, you can see how a technical team in a startup might evolve over time, including the roles and responsibilities for each position. If you'd like to use one of the structures with your own real data, simply delete the other structures in the template that aren't relevant for you, like in the video below:

Who might use this template?

CEOs, Technical founders, and CTOs in growing organizations might use this template as a great starting point to map out their current CTO organization or plan for how it might look in the future.

Note: This is intended to be an example only, not a proven best practice.

What's included in this template?