alt Hacker NewsEarly employees often have difficulty with the new reality. In the early days everyone is involved in making product decisions, helping with sales by implementing features, doing support for customers. If you hired juniors this is all they know.
Everyone doing everything is exactly what you don’t want in a larger organization. You need structure, you need dedicated teams for CX, product, development, QA, etc.
Often early employees perceive the decrease in scope as a demotion. They’re no longer defining the product, they’re no longer helping land the sale, at least not directly. For some that’s a hard pill to swallow and they resent it. Managing these so they can grow within the organization can be the right path, or not depending on the person.
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There’s a common scaling heuristic, related to Greiner’s growth model, that organizations need to fundamentally change how they operate as they grow. I recall numbers that every time your organization triples you need to change how you do things.
Part of this is communication overheads, and as op points out, the need, and ability, to specialise in a larger organisation.
That’s something I’ve never thought about. It’s a valid point and somewhat understandable.
The obvious solution is to promote them. If you don't reward loyalty don't expect loyalty.
A hard change is the required skills mix.
Early stage you want the generalists who can do everything, move fast and probably break things.
There's an inflection point where you want to stop breaking things and for that you need specialists. Experts in scaling, security, optimisation and code purists.
Finding new roles for your generalists at this point could be hard, even harder will be having to let them go. It's possibly something you should consider at the start and give them the ability to vest and leave for a new greenfield. Alternatively find them a role as an architect/lead where it's their responsibility to be across everything and able to bridge between teams because they have your domain and institutional knowledge.