Scaling didn't break your product. It broke how your company runs.
Not long ago, it was just you, your co-founders and the first few dozen employees building this thing.
You knew everyone you worked with. Collaborating with team members was easy, and things got done quickly. Everybody was encouraged to learn and make mistakes. Ideas moved fast, and decisions were made quickly. Company news and financial information were shared transparently with the team. Everybody understood the mission.
Fast forward three years. It seems like every day there’s a new person on your Slack that you’ve never met before; the company has scaled explosively to over 200 employees.
Sales and revenue have been climbing every year. You promoted a handful of the original crew into leadership roles. Your numbers say you’re doing great.
So, why does work seem infinitely harder?
As the company has grown, it’s taking more and more time to get things done. The team isn’t able to be as agile as when they were small. Collaboration between departments is getting more difficult; managers want team members to go through the “proper channels,” which means getting layers of approval to work together.
In my work with companies going through this stage, the same story surfaces over and over. Someone who used to walk over to the product team to get a customer issue solved in minutes now sends the request into a digital mailbox and waits days, weeks or forever for a response.
You get that the process is necessary, and you see it’s holding back the speed and creativity that made your organization so special.
Teams optimize their own priorities rather than the company’s priorities. They create their own goals and metrics, and suddenly, you’ve got several teams rowing in different directions. The organization becomes busy without being aligned in the same direction. And people are wary of making mistakes, so they play it safe to avoid retribution.
You don’t notice the change. It happens drip by drip. You are inundated with decisions, hiring, customer fires and raising capital. It's only when valued team members start leaving, decision velocity slows to a crawl and projects that used to get pumped out in days now take weeks or months.
So, what changed?
You’d assume your culture changes as a company grows. That’s the tip of the iceberg. As you grow, you stop being the one who carries the culture. Rather, it’s your managers who become the ones the team actually experiences culture through. Not the CEO. Their direct manager.
Many of your managers leading teams were promoted quickly through the ranks because of the way they do their work. Not because of the way they lead.
And if there isn’t an intentional process to develop these new leaders and to ensure they model and promote the same values, each team creates its own culture, and execution slowly erodes.
That’s where the inconsistencies begin.
Researchers Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein call this "noise": unwanted inconsistency in decision-making. In one noise audit at an insurance company, underwriters pricing the same policies came in 55% apart at the median. A senior executive put the annual cost in the hundreds of millions.
This is an execution problem: not a strategy problem or a culture problem, but rather a gap between the growth your company’s experienced and the capacity of your managers and senior leaders. You’ve now got 20 managers operating in silos, making their best-guess decisions, without a shared model for how to take ownership of their teams or hold accountability.
I've watched this play out time and time again. A company scales fast, the culture shifts before anyone names it and the first real signals show up too late, once top performers are starting to leave and creativity is inadvertently stifled. Then comes the cost of hiring and training a replacement, plus the months of lost productivity in between.
The companies that make it don’t make it by chance. They give their leaders a shared framework for leading so leadership stops being a personality trait and becomes the norm.
An operating system for your leaders isn't a nice-to-have as you scale. It's the foundational infrastructure.
Start with one question. If you left the room tomorrow, would your 20 managers lead the way you would? If you're not sure, that's the work.
Culture doesn’t scale on its own, but leadership does.
