Scaling a company when it graduates from that startup bubble is hard, painstakingly slow and fraught with obstacles and pit-holes.

It’s something that I have seen my friends go through as well as experienced myself.  The people around you fluctuate, many people leave along the way which means there is an ongoing battle between skilling up and knowledge walking out the door. The old processes don’t quite work with a larger team, even less with multiple teams, they become unmaintainable. The newer processes will never live up to the same efficiency as the old times and so leave a lingering frustration in the hearts of the old guard. Small teams are inherently more efficient but have less capacity. During this transition period it becomes important for the whole company to recognise that giving up some efficiency is necessary to get through the hump.

As teams scale, there are many parallel tasks for the leaders as they instigate change. Acceptance as well as the expectation of a slower pace of change becomes essential for the leader’s survival, but as a leader we must keep impetus for progression, otherwise we risk stagnation within the hump. We are not able to clone people or scale like you might expect from a tech system and ultimately the same laws apply to humans as they do to a job queue system, you can only churn through at the rate of current capacity, the rest will need to sit in the queue. This queueing can bear a heavy toll on the leader as they hold the future state and journey in their minds.

During a scale up period, the exponential growth of users will mean so many gremlins come out of the closet. These gremlins are edge-cases that were not a problem to deal with, coming out every now and again. Suddenly these edge-cases start to become real problems, not so “edge” anymore. 

I wonder if this also causes the hamster fire-wheel effect? New developers get thrown into this environment and they're just firefighting for weeks on end. This leads them depleted of energy coming out the other side, never having had the creative space they need to learn what thinking creatively and big picture strategy feels like.

So, I find myself again, in the middle of a task like this, it is quite daunting and yet I feel the need to keep going, to find the outcome where the team starts to work cohesively together. I remember, I’ve been here before, we will get there. The mystery will keep me wondering how far away it will be and what it will take to get there, until suddenly, we are there.