Why it’s difficult to build teams in high growth organisations
By “high growth”, I mean in terms of employee count and roughly doubling or more every year. Even at slower growth rates, some of the phenomena I’ll describe may be relevant.
The newbies outnumber the veterans in high growth. Default culture is not what pre-exists but whatever new people bring with them. Even with careful selection, it’s unlikely that cultural assumptions match up perfectly.
Pr esumptive team splitting is splitting a team before you need to, whether based on subjective anticipation or some kind of quantitative criteria (e.g., teams should have no more than 9 members).
Presumptive team splitting leads to unclear missions and missing skills, which leads to people filling time with low-value activity, which leads to boredom, which leads to disengagement and/or quitting.
For example, if a broader department-level product strategy is stable while more local tactics are volatile, you should want the structure and shared identity of the department to be stronger and more stable than team-level structures and identities.
