The Context
You joined an online SaaS business. It grew with time in the number of customers. People were hired to support those customers and to do even more for them. That way, the company grew from relatively easy to manage 50-100 people into almost 300 medium-sized organization. Let's paint a picture of what happened then
1
Acting at scale became hard
Things that used to work on a smaller scale now don't, or they take much time and energy to finish. Some tasks took just a couple of minutes per week. When the company scaled up, they now take hours or weeks to complete. Your teams now grew faster than your customer database.
2
Staying in the loop requires a lot of effort
People simply knew what was happening within the company. They took the best out of other projects to their own field. Right now, you have both people who teach others about what is happening and multiple duplicated things. There's no time for work. It's mostly catching up and staying up to date with meetings, updates and memos.
3
Old tech stack becomes clunky
The team is still using a very similar tech stack as it used to. While the market changed, AI happened, yet they still rely on things that they are familiar with instead of challenging the status quo. There's simply "no time" to explore what's possible right now.
Spoiler alert - there's a new world of solutions just around the corner.
4
Not enough changes
Some changes are happening, but with the scale of people and tools it's easy to run into hiccups like dependencies, vacations, reviews, and people's resistance to changes. The effect is that changes get stuck in the process.
5
There's no simplicy
The team tends to add things (aka complexity) into processes instead of removing them. Covering a corner case wins with going forward faster.