Scale vs. Speed: Why Organizations Slow Down

Scale vs. Speed: Why Organizations Slow Down

In today's fast-paced world, organizations face a constant dilemma between scale and speed. As they grow and expand, they often find that their ability to innovate and adapt slows down. This phenomenon is not unique to any particular industry or company, but rather a common challenge that many organizations face.

One of the main reasons why organizations slow down as they scale is due to a shift in customer expectations. When a company is just starting out, its customers are often early adopters who are looking for innovation and new ideas. However, as the company grows and gains more mainstream customers, their expectations shift towards trust, reliability, and efficiency.

Customers want promises kept, a lack of surprises, reasonable prices, and efficiency. They no longer prioritize innovation as much as they prioritize consistency and predictability. This shift in customer expectations puts pressure on organizations to focus more on delivering a reliable product or service rather than pushing the boundaries of innovation.

Another factor that contributes to the slowdown of organizations as they scale is the need to refactor their code from scratch. As a company grows, it often accumulates technical debt, which refers to the extra work that needs to be done in the future due to shortcuts or compromises made in the present. To continue scaling and improving, organizations need to invest time and resources into refactoring their codebase to ensure it is scalable and efficient.

However, refactoring code can be a time-consuming process that takes away from the speed of innovation. It requires assembling a dedicated team to tackle this task, taking them away from working on new features or products. While it may seem counterintuitive to slow down in order to speed up, refactoring code is a necessary step to ensure long-term scalability and efficiency.

Interestingly, many of the famous big companies we know today actually started with just a small team of dedicated individuals. Companies like Apple, Google, Slack, and Instagram all began with a dozen full-time employees. This highlights the importance of starting small and focusing on quality rather than quantity.

Now, let's shift our focus to Substack, a platform that has gained significant attention in recent years. Substack emerged as a solution to the challenges faced by traditional media organizations. It recognized that attention had become a scarce resource and that the traditional business model of optimizing for time was no longer effective.