Organize in SLAM Teams

Introduction

PepsiCo is a large, global organization. The complex nature of our work manifests as we’re assigned to work with people whom we’ve never met, or when we try to build an environment of collaboration with teams in other departments who have cultures, incentives, goals, and ways of communicating that are different from our own.

We confront this complexity by creating SLAM teams. SLAM teams are self-organizing, lean, autonomous and multidisciplinary (it’s an acronym, shhhhhhhh!). When we combine these characteristics, we foster agility, alignment, collaboration, and speed. Despite our size, we strive to act more like a network of small, tightly-knit teams. By organizing around the work to be done, rather than the lines and boxes of our matrixed org chart, our teams avoid becoming siloed.