Why the Org Chart Is Just a Suggestion: Inside TRM's Ownership Culture
A new EU sanctions rule caught a lot of companies off guard last year. It was written vaguely enough that nobody was quite sure who it applied to, and TRM's customers needed an answer before it turned into a costly guessing game.
Kiera Sibřina, a sanctions expert and blockchain intelligence analyst at TRM, didn't wait for instructions. She pulled in people from three different teams, got customers a clear answer before the rule even took effect, and called the regulators herself to make sure TRM had it right. No one assigned her that work or approved a plan first. She just picked it up and carried it through.
Ownership as a moat
Ownership culture is hard to fake — and to maintain. It requires hiring people whose judgment you actually trust, which means your hiring bar has to be really high. It requires managers who create space for people to run. And it requires leadership that backs the calls its team makes (even the difficult ones or the ones that don't land perfectly).
It’s a flywheel we’ve worked hard to foster: autonomy attracts builders, builders create impact, impact builds trust, trust creates more autonomy, more autonomy attracts more builders.
High-agency people do their best work when they're trusted with real problems. They build things that weren't in their job description; take blank-page moments and turn them into functions, partnerships, and programs; and stay — because the alternative is going somewhere they'd have to seek permission instead of exercise autonomy.
Red flag or green flag?
At TRM, ownership looks something like this:
- You decide what the problem is
- You decide how to fix it
- You pull in whoever you need
- You own the outcome, no matter how it turns out
The problems we seek to solve, combined with the latitude our team has to to act on them, tends to split candidates into two camps. Some read this degree of ownership as a red flag (that's fair; this isn't an environment everyone thrives in), while others find it energizing.
When Morley Gordon (TRM’s Head of Partnerships) joined TRM in 2024, he was the entire partnerships team. "There was no playbook waiting for me. No predecessor's strategy I was supposed to keep running. I had to decide what this function was going to be, and then go build it," he says.
That kind of blank-page start is either terrifying or exhilarating, depending on who you are and where you are in your career journey. For Morley, it was both, and it supercharged his productivity. Being the only person in partnerships meant sitting with every other function at TRM — marketing, legal, engineering, intel, sales — and figuring out, from the inside, where partnerships could actually move the needle.
"The muscle I built in those first months — figuring out where to place bets when nobody's telling you where to place them — is the same muscle the whole team (made up of seven people) runs on now," he says.
A scientific approach to problem-solving
This blank-page experience isn't unique to Morley and his team. One of our key operating principles is that when you join TRM, you're expected to figure out where the highest-leverage problems are and to start pulling on them.
I'll never forget a monthly business review for our people org in 2024. After I covered an open issue, I was told to go back to the drawing board, use the scientific method to re-examine the problem, and build a hypothesis for how to fix it (yes, I had to look up and remind myself what the actual steps of the scientific method even were).
As much as the initial thought sent me straight into 7th grade science class flashbacks, that spirit of structured interrogation, blended with a bias for experimentation, is very TRM. Our culture pushes hard for approaches that are thoughtful, intentional, and measurable — and that often means declaring your hypothesis upfront, before you've done the work, and then owning it when the results pour in.
Doing the waltz with your eyes closed
At TRM, moving without permission on something significant isn't seen as recklessness. Rather, it's pattern recognition. We spend a lot of time upfront enabling every new hire on our values (we call them “Leadership Principles”) and what they look like in practice. The goal is repetition so that embodying these principles becomes second-nature for anyone at TRM, and so they feel empowered to run fast without waiting for someone to give them a green light.
For example, earlier this year, Jenny Gai (Staff Product Marketing Manager at TRM), got a message from the CEO of Sphinx, an AI compliance platform TRM partners with, proposing a joint dinner to keep momentum on the partnership.
Jenny knew TRM's events team was slammed. But she also knew speed mattered. So she said yes, pulled in a couple of people as sounding boards, and ran with it — handling the venue selection, setting the menu and sending invitations, coordinating the target account list with Sphinx, and assigning outreach to account directors. 23 customers ended up attending the dinner. Their feedback was overwhelmingly positive. And the partnership got stronger.
"I didn't wait for someone else to execute. I just did what I needed to do to pull the event together," Jenny says. "I think that speaks a lot to TRM's culture around ownership."
Ownership requires trust in both directions
The ownership model only works because TRM invests heavily in hiring the right people. And then we actually trust them.
High performers don't want to execute someone else's playbook. They want real problems, real authority, and a culture that backs them when they make tough calls. "Having real authority over outcomes means getting really comfortable with making your own judgment calls, absent of permission or having that one last piece of feedback you might want before you feel fully confident,” says Jenny. “It's really just practicing judgment when you don't have complete and perfect data."
What this signals if you're thinking about joining
Ownership at TRM isn't a promise that gets walked back after you start. It's the operating mode for how teams across the business get work done.
A few things to expect if you’re thinking of joining TRM:
- You won't wait for someone to hand you a project. You'll identify the problem worth solving and start moving.
- Cross-functional ownership is the norm. If something important crosses team boundaries, that doesn't make it someone else's problem. It makes it yours.
- Failures belong to you as much as successes do. The flip side of real authority is real accountability. "Most decisions are reversible or fixable," Jenny says, "and nothing drives your learning and feedback loops faster than feeling empowered to have ownership." But you own the outcome either way.
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If you've worked somewhere that promises ownership and delivers tickets, the difference will be obvious within your first few weeks here. TRM is hiring engineers, analysts, operators, designers, and policy leaders who want to own something real. Check out our open roles and apply.
