Boxes: How to Scale Without Losing Trust
In my last newsletter, we talked about bags: those flexible, team-owned ways of working that don’t need to be standardized to be valuable. Bags are how your culture spreads. They’re light, local, and built to adapt.
But what about the things that shouldn’t adapt?
The shared foundations that must stay consistent across teams. Those belong in boxes.
Boxes are stable, solid, tested. They’re expensive to create and maintain. But if you’re scaling and still want teams to trust each other, you better have a few good boxes in place.
This newsletter is all about boxes - ready to jump inside?
Boxes Are More Than Rules - They’re Foundations
To understand boxes, let’s think of music for a moment.
Most musicians can jam together even if it’s their first time sharing a stage.
They have the same shared context, they know the scales and themes, they speak the same musical language without arguing about tempo or tuning. That’s the beauty of a shared structure: it gets out of the way. And what the audience hears is nothing but harmony.
Musical rules don’t limit creativity, they make it possible.
That’s exactly what boxes do in an organization: they give teams the shared language they need to move surely, together. They allow teams to work in harmony.
When a team hands off a specification, ships code, or kicks off an initiative using a box, you don’t need to double-check it or translate. You trust what you’re getting. You know what to do with it. No surprises, no sync meetings, no guess work.
That’s the whole point.
Boxes reduce the communication overhead of working together and they increase the trust of everyone involved. They let teams focus their conversations on what actually matters (the business!), not constant synchronization.
That type of clarity is what prevents teams from becoming each other’s biggest blocker.
What’s In a Box?
Boxes are more than checklists or templates.
They are full-blown operating mechanisms that create reliability across the organization. Fantastic and useful, but they come with a catch: they’re expensive.
So when you build a box, you need commitment. Don’t make something mandatory unless leadership is 100% behind it. Not just with words, but with time, resources, and visible ownership.
To be worth the investment, a box must be:
Documented: Proper documentation includes examples, templates, support materials, and training if needed. If people can’t understand and use the box independently, it’s not ready yet.
Measured: Every box should exist for a reason. What outcome do you want to create? What do you want to protect? If you can’t answer those questions clearly, the box isn’t ready.
Maintained: The world changes fast, and your boxes need to evolve with it. So if your teams are ignoring a box, it’s not rebellion, it’s feedback. When a box’s health metric starts to dip, ask yourself whether the box itself needs reinvestment or replacement.
Here’s an example of how that looks like in practice:
Imagine your onboarding experience is all over the place. One team has a great setup, while another just adds new hires to Slack and gives them scattered information. So you build a company-wide Onboarding Box.
It includes a 30-day checklist, a Notion hub with tools and dashboards, and a buddy system. It also points newcomers to the core boxes they need to understand early.
Now, every new hire knows what other teams expect from them, regardless of the team they joined. They know where to find information, and how to navigate the company’s way of working.
Why is this a box? Because the outcome matters across the company. If a new hire doesn’t learn the collaboration rules quickly, they’ll slow others down, without even realizing it.
What do you measure? Buddy and team satisfaction. If onboarding is weak, teams will feel it first, as they’ll have to explain the same things over and over again.
What does it protect? The flow of existing mechanisms from being interrupted. And it protects new hires too by helping them integrate faster, with fewer missteps and less anxiety about how to contribute.
Who Builds Boxes? And How?
Creating boxes is leadership’s responsibility.
Individual contributors can (and should!) suggest ideas, but the decision to turn something into a box must be deliberate, top-down, and visibly owned by leadership.
Because a box doesn’t just standardize a way of working, it sends a message: "This is how we do it here." It also serves the purpose of creating trust in a few areas that matter the most.
If leadership doesn’t stand behind it, the whole thing collapses.
When introducing a Bags & Boxes approach in your organization, start with boxes that already matter to leadership. You’re not ignoring the teams, but you’re making sure the system gets the support it needs to function.
When prioritizing boxes, keep these two guidelines in mind:
Just because something is important, it doesn’t mean it should be a box. For example, retrospectives are important, but they definitely belong in a bag. Importance and standardization are two different things.
Create a box roadmap or a prioritized list. Teams should know what’s not a box today but might become one soon. In the meantime, they can do it their way, but they’ll need to align once the box goes live.
And while leadership is defining the first set of boxes, teams don’t have to sit around waiting. They can keep working with bags: experimenting, iterating, and improving the way they operate locally. That’s the beauty of the system: it’s not sequential, it’s parallel. Boxes hold the foundation steady. Bags keep things moving.
Boxes Scale While Bags Spread
If bags are how culture spreads, boxes are how scale stays sane.
They don’t contradict each other, they reinforce one another.
Bags let teams move fast. Boxes make sure they don’t break each other’s legs in the process.
In my next newsletter, I’ll show you how to use both together, so you get the speed of local autonomy and the reliability of global coordination.
Stay tuned.