Scaling
What breaks at every size, and what to fix first.
A stage-by-stage field guide from five engineers to a few hundred, including the failure modes that arrive right on schedule.
What breaks at every size
Org failures arrive on a schedule. Knowing which one is next turns a crisis into a maintenance task you did early.
0-5 · 5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Hiring plans and budget, in the CFO's language
A headcount request is a bet about next year's output. Argue it bottom-up from outcomes and unit costs, in the CFO's language, never as a number you need.
20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Process debt
Process accumulates like code and gets removed far less often. Every rule should name the failure it prevents and when that failure last happened, or it goes.
20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Keeping speed at scale
Big organisations aren't inherently slow. They're slow because coordination cost grows quadratically unless you deliberately design it down, and a strong platform layer is what buys most of it back.
50-150 · 150+