Product Answers #5: How can we move super fast without breaking the org and send people into burnout?
This question came from the CEO of a start-up. It took her and the team a while to get the product right, but now demand grew steeply. She did not want to watch the competition to catch up. It was time to scale the product and the organisation as a whole.
It’s not easy to know when moving fast is too fast. Will marketing be able to quickly make your product known to a large audience without spending all of the company’s money on advertising? Will customer service be able to handle all the requests, once customers come rushing in? Are the product teams capable of enhancing the product to the more diverse needs of the larger customer audience without getting lost in all the edge cases? Will leadership be able to steer the organisation into the right direction by focusing on the largest growth opportunities and leave aside the rest?
Signs of moving too fast are product teams that can’t manage the rising technical complexity anymore. The product is growing fast and the technical side needs constant adaptation. Too fast in this sense means, that the teams don’t get the time to clean up anymore and are fully focused on the new things only. Systems get overly complex and eventually crash.
Another common sign of going too fast is exploding operational efforts. More and more people are busy with tasks that do not add value, but are needed to keep the organisation running. Taking calls of confused customers, cleaning broken data, mitigating outages etc. If your operational efforts multiply too quickly, you need to take more care about the underlying issues. Is it just because you have more customers, or did you miss preparing the organisation for the growth?
These issues can lead to a very serious sign of moving too fast: burnout. The tolerance for stress, pressure and handling lots of parallel things varies with every person. At some point, it’s just too much for a person to cope with. Employees burning out is the symptom of an organisation, that is not able to slow down and re-focus when it needs to. Once you hit this state, you realise that you should have taken the time to identify the state of your org earlier.
Do it now. Take the human factor of your people serious and find out how to make your organisation more resilient so you get ready for the next growth phase. Leaning only towards shipping new features and acquiring new customers will eventually force you to hit the reset button. That’s going to be very costly and your company might not survive it. It wouldn’t be the first one. Instead, constantly invest a certain amount of your people’s time (think about 20-30%, generally speaking) to keep existing systems up to date and take care about your existing customer base. The rest of the time is available to be invested in the growth of your organisation.