When a company hits the scaling wall, the first instinct is usually structural changes like reorganizing, creating new roles, bringing in a senior hire. Org changes feel substantive, but they’re rarely enough.
I’ve built ten organizations from scratch over the last 20+ years — most recently a practice at ZS that grew from zero to more than $30M in under two years, with 300 people across multiple continents. None of the teams I’ve built and scaled started with an org chart; each one started with the customer and worked backwards to what the organization needed to be capable of doing.
Most companies build their operating model from the inside out — the reporting lines, the headcount plan, the roadmap — and then fit the work to the structure. The companies that get through the scaling wall build it the other way around; they start from what the customer needs, and let that determine what the organization has to be able to do. It’s the core of Lean thinking, and it comes down to three principles I’ve used to build and to advise over and over again:
Start with the customer.
Before you decide who reports to whom, decide what the customer needs from you, and what you would have to be capable of to deliver it. Build from there. Most reorganizations skip this step — they rearrange the structure and hope the customer outcomes follow. But they usually end up creating new problems, instead.
Walk the shop floor.
You can’t see operational issues solely from a dashboard or a status report. Observe interactions with customers firsthand, whether that’s in a sales cycle or in customer support. Lean calls this genchi genbutsu, “go and see.” Most symptoms of the scaling wall are invisible from the top; the real reasons things go awry only become clear by engaging where the work gets done.
Pursue perfection.
Scaling isn’t achieved through a one-time reorganization. It’s an iterative process — make a change, watch what it does, learn, and adapt. A big reorg is the opposite instinct, and it’s often why the same problems crop up again six months later in a new form.
Someone has to own this discipline. At scale, that’s the work of a Chief Customer Officer in the way that Jeanne Bliss champions — company-wide leadership that unites the organization around the customer to drive growth. Most scaling companies don’t have that role, so the work ends up in pieces across functions. Absent a clear owner keeping the customer’s perspective at the center of the company’s decisions, individual functions may make decisions that don’t serve the company’s best interests in the long run. I think that cross-functional customer focus is one of the most consequential and under-resourced perspectives in any company trying to scale.
Starting with the customer isn’t a one-time fix — it’s a way of seeing the world. The anthropologist’s habit of watching how people really work is a perspective I carry through every engagement, and it’s the lens this series will use at every stage. The six stages aren’t six separate problems to solve; they’re one discipline applied across the whole journey from product-market fit to scaled operations.
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