You added people because the company needed more capacity.
Engineering got stronger.
Operations added support.
Sales hired.
Maybe you added a manager or two.
So why does everything suddenly require more meetings, more context, more approvals, and more follow-up?
The answer is often not that hiring failed.
It is that headcount scales faster than coordination systems.
More People Means More Communication Paths
A small team can run on shared context.
Everyone knows what is happening.
People know who handles what.
Someone can ask a question in Slack and get the answer from the right person immediately.
That works surprisingly well.
Then the team grows.
The problem is that adding people does not just add capacity.
It also adds relationships between people.
A simplified version looks like this:
5 people:
A <-> B <-> C <-> D <-> E
15 people:
many more possible communication paths
many more handoffs
many more dependencies
many more places for context to get lost
You do not need everyone talking to everyone.
But if the operating model does not define how work should move, that is effectively what starts happening.
People compensate with messages, meetings, and escalation.
The Bottleneck Moves Between Teams
A lot of scaling problems do not exist inside a department.
They exist between departments.
Engineering may be working well.
Sales may be working well.
Operations may be working well.
But the workflow between them looks like this:
Sales
↓
needs clarification
↓
Operations
↓
waiting on approval
↓
Founder
↓
back to Operations
↓
Engineering
↓
missing context
↓
back to Sales
Nobody in that chain is necessarily performing badly.
The system is slow because the handoffs are unclear.
This is important for technical leaders because the instinct is often to solve slow execution with more capacity.
Another developer.
Another PM.
Another operations hire.
But if the bottleneck is in coordination, additional capacity may just create more handoffs.
The Founder Becomes the Internal API
This is one of the patterns I find most interesting.
As a company grows, the founder often becomes the integration layer between teams.
Not intentionally.
It just happens.
Sales asks:
Who should handle this?
Operations asks:
Did we agree to this?
Engineering asks:
Is this actually the priority?
A manager asks:
Can I make this decision?
The founder has enough context to answer all of them.
So every uncertain path routes through the same person.
From a software perspective, it looks like a service that every other service depends on.
Sales --------\
Operations ----> Founder -> Decision
Engineering --/
Delivery -----/
It works.
Until traffic increases.
Then latency goes up.
The founder spends the day resolving dependencies instead of doing the work only the founder can do.
Informal Context Does Not Scale
Small companies often have undocumented but functional systems.
You hear things like:
"Ask Priya. She knows how that works."
or:
"The founder remembers why we changed that."
That is fine when the team is small.
But eventually knowledge stored inside people becomes an infrastructure problem.
The company needs to move from:
people carrying context
to:
systems carrying context
That does not mean documenting every possible detail.
It means making recurring work understandable without requiring the same person to explain it every time.
A useful workflow usually needs to answer:
Where does this start?
Who owns it?
What information is required?
What happens next?
Who decides when something is unclear?
What counts as done?
That is often enough.
More Meetings Are Usually a Patch
When coordination gets worse, the common response is:
communication problem -> add meeting
Then another.
Then a cross-functional sync.
Then a quick follow-up.
Soon the company has spent a lot of time discussing work that still is not moving cleanly.
Meetings are useful.
But they do not solve unclear ownership.
If nobody knows who owns the outcome, the meeting just temporarily holds the system together.
A healthier sequence looks more like this:
Priority
↓
Owner
↓
Workflow
↓
Decision rights
↓
Handoff
↓
Done
The meeting should support that system.
It should not replace it.
Decision Rights Matter More as Teams Grow
Another source of slowdown is the difference between input and approval.
Growing teams often want more collaboration.
That is good.
But collaboration becomes expensive when everyone with input effectively becomes an approver.
A decision might involve five people.
That does not mean five people need veto power.
A cleaner model is:
many people can provide input
few people approve
one person owns the decision
This is especially important in technical organizations.
A CTO should not have to approve every implementation detail.
A founder should not have to resolve every cross-functional disagreement.
A senior engineer should not become the permanent bottleneck for every technical decision.
Clear decision boundaries reduce latency.
Documentation Should Remove Questions
Engineers already understand this idea from good APIs.
A good interface reduces ambiguity.
You should not need to inspect the implementation every time you call it.
Business workflows work the same way.
A good process gives people enough information to move without constantly asking:
Who does this?
What happens next?
Where do I put this?
Who can approve it?
If those questions repeat every week, the process is probably underdefined.
Documentation should not become bureaucracy.
It should reduce coordination overhead.
If maintaining the process takes more effort than the work itself, you went too far.
Coordination Debt Is Real
Technical teams talk about technical debt.
Growing companies accumulate coordination debt too.
It starts with small shortcuts.
A spreadsheet because the system was not ready.
A Slack thread instead of a workflow.
The founder approving something temporarily.
A meeting created to fix one communication problem.
None of these decisions are necessarily bad.
The problem is when the temporary solution becomes infrastructure.
Eventually the company is running on:
tribal knowledge
manual follow-up
informal approvals
side-channel communication
founder intervention
That works until scale exposes it.
Then everyone feels busy and execution still feels slow.
Where an Integrator Fits
This is where I think the Integrator role becomes useful.
Not as another management layer.
The job is to reduce the amount of coordination that depends on individual people.
That usually means creating clarity around:
ownership
handoffs
recurring workflows
decision rights
escalation paths
priorities
cross-functional dependencies
The goal is not process for process's sake.
The goal is that the company can coordinate more people without requiring more chaos.
A larger team should eventually create more capability.
If each new hire also creates additional dependence on leadership, something in the operating model needs to change.
A Practical Coordination Checklist
Before concluding that a slow team needs more people, I would ask:
Do important tasks have one clear owner?
Are cross-functional handoffs explicit?
Does required context travel with the work?
Do people know who has final decision authority?
Are recurring workflows documented?
Are the same questions repeatedly routed to founders or senior leaders?
Do projects stall more often between teams than inside teams?
Are meetings solving problems, or compensating for unclear systems?
Can employees find the information they need without asking someone?
Would another hire reduce the bottleneck, or add another connection to manage?
If several of those answers are uncomfortable, headcount may not be the main issue.
The Real Scaling Shift
A small company can operate because people know things.
A larger company has to operate because the system knows where things belong.
That is the transition.
Not from flexible to bureaucratic.
From implicit to explicit.
From:
"Ask the founder."
to:
"The owner is clear."
From:
"Someone should follow up."
to:
"This person owns the outcome."
From:
"We discussed it somewhere."
to:
"The decision is recorded here."
Hiring creates capacity.
But coordination determines how much of that capacity actually turns into execution.
If the team keeps getting bigger while the company keeps feeling slower, the next question probably should not be:
Who else should we hire?
It should be:
Can our operating system coordinate the people we already have?
I wrote a longer version of this idea here: You Hired 10 People. Why Does It Still Feel Slow?
