Growth-Stage Companies: Scaling to Success
Those startups skilled and fortunate enough (it usually takes both) to get to product/market fit are ready to tackle another equally difficult challenge: how to effectively grow and scale.
There are many very significant challenges involved in growing and scaling a startup into a large, successful business. While it’s an extremely difficult challenge, it is, as we say, a good problem to have. In addition to hiring lots more people, we need to figure out how to replicate our earlier successes with new, adjacent products and services. At the same time, we need to grow the core business as fast as possible.
In growth stage, we typically have somewhere between about 25 and several hundred engineers, so there are many more people around to help, but the signs of organizational stress are everywhere. Product teams complain that they don’t understand the big picture—they don’t see how their work contributes to the larger goals, and they’re struggling with what it means to be an empowered, autonomous team.
Sales and marketing often complain that the go-to-market strategies that worked for the first product are not so appropriate for some of the new products in the portfolio. The technology infrastructure that was created to meet the needs of the initial product is often bursting at the seams, and you start to hear the term “technical debt” from every engineer you speak with. This stage is also tough on leaders because the leadership style and mechanisms that worked while the company was a young startup often fail to scale. Leaders are forced to change their roles and, in many
cases, their behaviors. But the motivation to overcome these challenges is very strong.
The company is often in pursuit of a public offering or, perhaps, becoming a major business unit of an existing company. As well as the very real possibility of having a significant and positive impact on the world can be very motivating.
While it’s an extremely difficult challenge, it is, as we say, a good problem to have.