XMind Rebuilt Around 30-Person 'Circles' Where Leads Control Bonuses and Scoring

Mind-mapping software firm XMind restructured its 50-person organization into roughly 30 staff arranged in self-managed 'circles,' granting circle leads both performance-scoring rights and direct control over bonus distribution. The reorganization, detailed by co-founder Mango on the AI Alchemy podcast, also dissolved the entire QA team — only for the company to discover afterward that almost no automated testing existed and engineers had been manually checking everything informally. Mango noted that giving leads authority over real money, not just scores, produced an unexpected benefit: participants began thinking and behaving more like co-founders dividing equity. The restructure also unblocked output that had previously gone unclaimed, such as complete multilingual documentation produced in roughly two months, which Mango attributed to clearer credit allocation rather than AI translation speed alone. XMind's experience suggests that organizations adopting AI may see limited gains not from a lack of tools, but because no structural mechanism exists for individuals to claim and be rewarded for new work.