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Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?

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Re: Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?

#81
post #29

Early employees often have difficulty with the new reality. In the early days everyone is involved in making product decisions, helping with sales by implementing features, doing support for customers. If you hired juniors this is all they know. Everyone doing everything is exactly what you don’t want in a larger organization. You need structure, you need dedicated teams for CX, product, development, QA, etc. Often e…

You are not wrong, but I would like to throw in some caveats from my experience:

"Expert" management was brought in who didn't know the industry and didn't know the company and didn't respect the people who were there, who had been eating their own dog food for years. I saw so many stupid decisions being made; I was sidelined and ignored. And then, the corporate bullshit started creeping in where management were lying to their own employees. So, yes, if my opinion stops mattering, it is an unjustified demotion, especially when the layers of management brought in over me clearly don't know WTF they are doing.

Re: Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?

#82
post #5

This might not be the first to break, but it will eventually, and if corrected NOW will make things much smoother: Your documentation of processes and procedures is NOT adequate. 'everyone used to know about are getting lost' - oh good thing your documentation makes this clear, because it is obviously their fault. 'New hires take forever to ramp up' - oh good thing you have complete ramp up plan and documentation, be…

[flagged]

Configure Slack to only retain messages for a month or so. People will stop relying on it for such.

Re: Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?

#83
post #5

This might not be the first to break, but it will eventually, and if corrected NOW will make things much smoother: Your documentation of processes and procedures is NOT adequate. 'everyone used to know about are getting lost' - oh good thing your documentation makes this clear, because it is obviously their fault. 'New hires take forever to ramp up' - oh good thing you have complete ramp up plan and documentation, be…

[flagged]

That’s a culture/leadership problem.

Re: Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?

#85
post #76
post #41

[flagged]

This seems to be a plagiarized paraphrase of @le-mark's comment, which was posted one hour earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47424625 @dang I think the account that I'm replying to might be a bot?

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