Team Adjacency Diagram
Map who needs to sit next to whom — and who shouldn't. Export the analysis for the office-move steering committee.
Org designers, HR leads, and ops teams running an office move (or planning a cross-functional squad) regularly need to answer "which roles need close collaboration, and which can stay async?" A team adjacency diagram captures the answer in one slide: each role or team appears as a row, each cell encodes whether two roles need primary collaboration (daily stand-ups, shared rituals), secondary collaboration (weekly syncs, async chat), or are deliberately kept apart (different sales motions, conflicting noise levels, regulatory separation). It's the org-design analog of an interior designer's room-adjacency matrix — same structure, different domain.
This tool gives org and ops leads a fast way to build that analysis without booking a workshop. Start with the Cross-Functional Team template — pre-loaded with a representative product-development squad (PM, Designer, Frontend, Backend, QA, Data Analyst, Customer Support, Sales) and realistic default adjacencies — and adapt it to your org's actual structure. Click cells to mark each role pair's collaboration intensity. The matrix updates live as you add or remove roles, and your work auto-saves between sessions.
For office-move use cases specifically, the editable PowerPoint export makes the steering-committee conversation much smoother. Every cell becomes a real selectable shape in your deck — recolor a row when a re-org adds a team, drag a label when someone moves, copy the matrix to a before/after comparison slide. Free users get a watermark-free PNG and JSON backup, which is enough for first-draft work; the editable PPTX (plus vector SVG and copy-to-PowerPoint) is the Pro upgrade. For deeper exploration of who belongs in which meeting, the matrix data can later be combined with a stakeholder map — see the main Adjacency Matrix Diagram tool for the broader catalogue.
Frequently asked questions
Why use a team adjacency matrix instead of an org chart?
An org chart shows reporting hierarchy — who reports to whom. A team adjacency matrix shows collaboration intensity — who works closely with whom regardless of reporting structure. The two answer different questions. Hierarchy is useful for HR; adjacency is what you need for office layouts, cross-functional squad design, and meeting cadence planning.
Can I use this for office seating decisions?
Yes — office-seating planning is the most common use of a team adjacency diagram. Build the matrix once, then use it as the input for the seating chart: roles with primary adjacency sit close, roles with undesired adjacency are placed at opposite ends of the floor. The Pro PowerPoint export drops cleanly into the office-move steering-committee deck.
How should I handle roles that span multiple teams?
If a role legitimately splits across multiple functions (e.g. an engineering manager who does both design and engineering), list it once and mark its adjacency to each function it engages with. If two distinct roles share a title but belong to different teams, list them separately with a disambiguating label (e.g. 'PM — Growth' vs 'PM — Platform').
Does this work for remote-first teams?
Yes — the matrix maps collaboration intensity regardless of whether the team is co-located. For remote teams, 'primary adjacency' translates to shared rituals (daily stand-ups, same Slack channels, paired pull-request reviews) rather than physical proximity. Use the matrix to plan meeting cadence and async communication patterns instead of seating charts.
Can I share the matrix with the office-move steering committee?
Either share the editable PowerPoint export (Pro) so they can recolor or relabel during the meeting, or download the watermark-free PNG (free signup) and embed it in the existing deck. The JSON state-file backup lets you version the matrix in your team's shared drive so successive iterations are easy to compare.