Scaling Teams

Scaling Up

The successful techniques that leaders use to manage small companies and teams often don’t work when the company or its teams expand too quickly. This is a common problem for high-tech start-ups, particularly those in “hyper-growth” mode – that is, trying to expand more than 50% in six to twelve months. Without a proper scale-up plan, high-tech teams trying to integrate new members may become less productive at software development or whatever their assigned tasks are than they were before their team’s rapid expansion began.

Rapidly growing start-ups with 10 to 250 employees or smaller technical teams that quickly ramp up inside large, well-established organizations both may experience diminished productivity and difficulty with communications. The growing pains that hyper-growth firms typically encounter include disgruntled employees, morale problems, product snafus and unhappy customers.

The default solution to the challenges of expansion is to hire more people, but that may make things worse. Many managers of high-tech start-ups mistakenly believe that the best way to fix their problems is to hire more “individual contributors” (...