A "medium sized organisation" problem
A lot gets written (at least, in the part of the business world that I hang out in!) about the problems facing early stage startups. If you want to know more about how to find product market fit, there dozens of books, podcasts, and newsletters filled with advice. It’s a known problem.
At the heart of PMF is figuring out how to solve a problem for the customer, and this never stops being important to organisations. Creating value (= the thing the customer cares about) is what drives not just survival but innovation in all organisations - even non-profits. The quest to both understand, and reach, customers is a lifelong concern for a business.
But what you hear about less is that other concern, which only comes along as you have found enough PMF to need to scale. That is the challenge of being an organisation. This is usually not much of a problem for small and micro businesses. I’m not saying that there isn’t the need to lead and manage them. But organisations under about 20 people can generally function in a good enough way on the basis of the relationships that arise naturally between people. You can be a group of people doing a thing, and get good results.
Once you get over that threshold - past the limit of everyone being able to sit around a desk together in one office - you start to need to be an organisation. There is a new thing that you need to master, beyond PMF, which is “how to get a group of people, too big to passively be in contact with each other, to work in a way that their individual efforts all add up to moving in the right direction”. That’s what “being an organisation” is. And the technology for doing that is: management.
As a medium sized organisation you need to start having some kind of deliberately designed system of management in place, because you can’t rely on things “just working” any more. Once your team gets over about 20 people, you’re going to have to face up to the fact that as founders you will no longer be able to be directly in contact with everyone who works in the organisation1. You are going to have to be indirectly in contact with most of them, through a management layer.
That also means that if your founders are the best technical people in the business, you need some way of transmitting technical excellence that no longer relies on being mentored by directly by the founders. That’s why when organisations scale I think they need to learn how to teach people what it is that they do. “Management as teaching” is a way to instil technical excellence - and when that teaching is focused on “solving customer problems” it also embeds the pursuit of value (and therefore the generation of income) into the heart of the work.
The good news is that once you start to become an organisation, and not just a group of people, you begin to create something that can survive beyond the tenure of individual post holders, and that can do what it does not just for years but for decades to come.
Practically, in terms of time and headspace, how many direct reports can anybody reasonably have? Is it much more than 5 or 6?