Organizational Scalability

Problem

When your company has grown to a point where there are multiple teams, it can be difficult to ensure that every team has ownership and a clear vision.

Actions taken

"Structuring your teams to be efficient and making sure that once you have multiple teams every team has a clear vision and scope is really important."

The reason a small company works is that you have six to ten people who can easily communicate with one another. With teams larger than this, you can lose efficiencies, so once your company gets larger it's useful to break the company up into six to ten people teams. Each team should be more or less autonomous, because if you have a lot of dependencies it makes it very hard to manage teams independently, as you'll constantly be tripping over other teams.

This is usually when you set up two levels of management - the front line and second line managers. If you're at a Director or VP level it's important to have a clear understanding of what each team is doing and to ensure there is minimal friction between teams. Where you see duplicates or conflicts in your teams' planning, this is where you can step in to prevent duplication of efforts or fights.

Lessons learned

I've seen this type of scenario at various companies, with various levels of scaling. Ensuring smooth organizational scalability is one of the biggest influences on whether or not a company will be successful.