Autonomy at Scale¶
November 17, 2025 · LinkedIn
8 reactions · 3 comments · 428 views
💬 Autonomy at Scale
Over the years, I’ve realized the hardest part of scaling a software organization isn’t code — it’s autonomy.
That belief became the foundation for eXOReaction, which we built to explore better ways of building and running custom software — ways that scale trust, not control, and ultimately optimize success for our customers.
We run a 24/7 distributed engineering setup across time zones — no meetings, no timesheets, no traditional ops department.
Everything is asynchronous and trust-based.
But autonomy doesn’t mean freedom to do whatever you want.
It means the responsibility to decide well when nobody is watching.
Our rule is simple: autonomy means owning your decisions, not just your commits.
We write everything down so decisions stay visible and reversible.
That makes communication durable — and because everything is written, people think before they speak.
Clarity quietly replaces hierarchy.
And strangely, removing process created more discipline, not less.
Developers started optimizing for developer-time, not manager-time.
After thousands of releases, one truth keeps proving itself:
When teams are trusted to organize themselves, they build and run better systems — faster, more resilient, and ultimately more valuable for customers.
Autonomy isn’t chaos.
It’s craft, practiced under trust.
Discussion¶
Hi Totto, very interesting. I am very curious to what steps you had to take to achive this kind of trust - and to how you then structured the written communication, within the teams and across the teams. I see the danger of having everything in writing will also create so much noise, and you spend so much time reading, that final decisions and the nuggest would be very well hidden and hard to find. (until you put an LLM on top of it): Hi Totto, very interesting. I am very curious to what steps you had to take to achive this kind of trust - and to how you then structured the written communication, within the teams and across the teams. I see the danger of having everything in writing will also create so much noise, and you spend so much time reading, that final decisions and the nuggest would be very well hidden and hard to f...
Totto ↩: OK, I'll admit that there are good and bad days. But we can start by hiring/employing people you initially admire and trust, in some cases people you have met many times over the years (yes; a little cheating there). I also intentionally delegate "open" tasks, this help me see, learn, understand the "thought and design" process for our people. Small and frequent commits to trunk is also a ke...
**Trust breeds trust, but it doesn’t mean everyone operates the same way. People have different work rhythms and different needs. Some need the occasional video call, some do their best work in an office, and others prefer working late at night and some need no meetings at all.
Recognizing and adapting to those differences is a core part of building real autonomy and trust. Self-understanding plays a huge role too. Accountability means being able to state without fear “I don’t understand,” “I need help,” or “this isn’t working for me", or even the odd times "sorry for my over-reaction, I am having a bad day". Being open to and valuing other's feedback whilst also recognizing the human in us all is imperative.
Because feedback, self-adjustment, and personal accountability reinforce one another. When teams operate with that awareness, trust stops being an abstract principle and becomes a shared practice. Freedom always comes with responsibility and in our experience people are willing to work hard to protect that. **: Trust breeds trust, but it doesn’t mean everyone operates the same way. People have different work rhythms and different needs. Some need the occasional video call, some do their best work in an office, and others prefer working late at night and some need no meetings at all.
Recognizing and adapting to those differences is a core part of building real autonomy and trust. Self-understanding p...