Somewhere between $20M and $150M in revenue, most technology companies hit a wall – or multiple walls – in their operating model.
It doesn’t show up on the P&L at first, but rather as a set of persistent, intertwined problems that are tough to resolve. Solutions in one functional area of the business often don’t move the needle, and thoughtfully deliberated decisions don’t result in meaningful change either.
This is the scaling wall.
I’ve spent most of my career building technology practices and product organizations from the inside and advising the founders and operators working through the same challenges from the outside.
This post marks the beginning of a new blog post series called From Here to Scale. Using my experience as an operator and management consultant, I’ve organized this series around the journey between product-market fit and institutional scale. Navigating the challenges at each of these six stages determines a company’s ability to adapt and grow.
- Stage 1 — Market & Product Signal. Are you solving a real problem? Are you asking the right questions, learning from the right signals, in the right places, from the right people?
- Stage 2 — Product & Adoption. What behavior does the solution need to change? Did you design for that behavior change, and for the way people want to do the work?
- Stage 3 — Commercial Motion. Are you selling what you can deliver, and capturing the value you create?
- Stage 4 — Delivery & Professional Services. Can you deliver what you sold — repeatedly, at scale, without the wheels coming off?
- Stage 5 — Post-Sales & Retention. Do customers stay, grow, and tell others, or do they leave quietly while you’re focused on the next sale?
- Stage 6 — Scaling the Organization. Can the organization absorb the growth and keep building?
Each stage has its own opportunities and patterns of failure. Most companies are navigating three or four big challenges at once, and the stages interact in ways that can disguise the real problem. What looks like a retention problem often turns out to be related to adoption — the product wasn’t designed for the behavior that needed to change. The journey I’ve outlined is a framework to help leaders make sense of where they are stuck, and why.
Starting this week, my aspiration is to publish two posts a week grounded in my own work, moving through the six stages over the course of the series. Each post will address a pattern I’ve watched play out, and I’ll share how I’ve addressed it as a leader or as a consultant.
The map shows you where a company can get stuck. What it doesn’t show is why these problems tend to surface together, or what to do once they do. Thursday’s post addresses the operating-model problem of the scaling wall, and the discipline that gets a company through it — starting with the customer and working backwards.
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