Company-level Agility – Overcome Scaling Challenges and Regain Traction Using Product Thinking and Patterns

Are you frustrated that you can’t get anything significant done anymore in your business?

Are cross-functional initiatives doomed from the start? Are you tempted to hire “Project/Program Managers” to manage all this integration?

You’ve tried hiring competent leaders, implementing the best practice approach within functions. That Sales framework. Agile Marketing. But after months and $$$, you’re still sluggish like those incumbents you’re trying to disrupt.

The road to scaling/growth is full of challenges and uncertainties. But as the company grows, your ability to tackle these inflection points diminishes.

What if you could have the Traction of a small team even as you scale up?

Imagine everyone having clarity on the strategic direction and executing efficiently and effectively.

Fewer dependencies, much more empowerment and autonomy.

There’s a clear scorecard of the things that really matter and people collaborate with others on moving the needle, regardless of where they report.

You see people acting like integrators, mini CEOs.

Issues and Problems surface, but they are tackled quickly.

And your operating system continues to evolve to fit your needs, even through significant inflection points.

Developing The Company Like a Product

More and more businesses are applying the principles used to build products—empowered cross-functional teams, aligned autonomy, and evidence-based empiricism—to scaling up the company/organization itself.

One way to approach this is by developing a specific key business process (such as GTM, employee experience, sales operating system or the classic New Product Development) as a product.

Another approach is to work with the leadership team to see and develop the whole organization/company as a product (or as a portfolio of products – the key business processes/activities that make the business model work).

As a Develop Your Company Like a Product coach, I’m helping leaders in Biotech scale-ups, Healthcare providers, and technology companies create and evolve an agility-inspired operating system to support their continued scale-up journey.

We examine relevant patterns and frameworks (think EOS/Traction, Scaling Up, Scrum, Kanban), identify a workable starting point for the organization, and iteratively shape an operating system that fits the organization’s context.