Org Chart Builder

Drawing a clean reporting structure in a slide deck takes way longer than it should, and the boxes never line up.

This builder takes a simple list of people and managers and renders the tree for you. Add a name, pick who they report to, and the layout updates as you go. You can export the result as an image or copy a structured version for use elsewhere.

It handles the awkward cases too: dotted-line reports, multiple founders at the top, contractors hanging off a single team. Most rough orgs of 30 to 200 people fit on one screen with a little zoom, which is usually all anyone needs for a planning conversation.

Under the hood, the layout uses a tidy-tree algorithm — the same family of algorithms that powers most decent diagram tools. Each node gets positioned so siblings are evenly spaced, parents sit centered above their children, and the whole tree avoids edge crossings where it can. When you add a person, the algorithm re-runs in milliseconds, which is why dragging someone into a new manager doesn't feel laggy. The data model behind it is just a list of (person, manager) pairs — flat, easy to import, easy to export. Anything more complex (titles, departments, photos) is decoration on top of that core graph.

The pain this exists to solve is real. You're prepping for a planning offsite, you have a roster of 80 people in a spreadsheet, and somebody asks for the org chart by Friday. Lucidchart costs money, the slide deck approach takes hours, and Visio is a thing that exists in 2002. So you fire this up, paste a CSV, screenshot what comes out, drop it into the deck. Done in five minutes.

Where it falls down: organizations that don't actually have a tree structure. Holacracy, circle-based orgs, project-matrix shops where reporting lines genuinely cross — these don't render cleanly because the underlying reality isn't a tree. The dotted-line feature helps a bit but past three or four dotted edges per person the chart becomes a hairball. If your org actually looks like that, the chart isn't the problem. The chart is just being honest about a structure that's hard to draw because it's hard to live in.

One related concept worth knowing: span of control. Most management literature suggests 5-10 direct reports is healthy. When you build the chart and see a manager with 22 reports, that's worth a conversation. Visualizing the structure surfaces these issues without anyone having to bring them up in a meeting first.