The Secret Startup Scaling Strategy No One Talks About

 At the heart of why it becomes so difficult for companies to maintain their startup momentum while scaling up is a fundamental issue around how information flows between teams.

To complete any task or bit of work, you need two key types of information inputs:

1. Short-term validity information - This is the transactional data and day-to-day synchronization required at the moment, like letting others know you've completed a deliverable or getting a quick status update.
2. Long-term validity information - This is the deeper institutional knowledge, processes, and skills that hold lasting value beyond any single task or project. Sometimes even so simple like where to find some documentation or who knows what.

Effective communication requires three components - the short-term transactions, the longstanding knowledge, and the "social noise" that builds relationships and culture. Miss any one of those ingredients, and you have to loop in others by generating additional tasks and requests for information.

The prioritization of those incoming requests is heavily influenced by social factors as well as a company hierarchy and KPIs. Within a small, tight-knit team, there are high levels of relationship capital and "social noise" unrelated to the work itself. This means any request from a teammate tends to get prioritized more highly based on human ties.

However, when requests come from other departments or teams where you have little personal connection, they automatically get deprioritized. The social incentive to go out of your way for others diminishes dramatically.

This dynamic is sustainable when a company is still at a startup scale with minimal team boundaries. But as more structural holes emerge between groups within a larger organization, those relationship fibers fray. As a result, critically important long-term knowledge and processes don't disperse as freely.

The byproduct is steady communication breakdowns - constant duplicate efforts as different teams struggle to stay synced on the latest information they need from others. The overhead compounds as the company scales.

Leadership teams usually try tackling this in a few ways:

Activities like offsites, team-building events, internal community groups, and the like aim to rebuild social connections across departments. While helpful for morale, these are costly continuous investments with temporary impacts once the separating forces of specialization and growth reassert themselves.

Adopting processes and systems that intentionally try to diminish the role of social relationships in dispersing information. Rather than hoping personal bonds persist at scale, these approaches hardcode communication pathways to keep teams synced.

The most powerful - if often overlooked - process solution is building purposeful Q&A workflows specifically for capturing and routing knowledge that teams repeatedly need from others.

Instead of just passive documentation efforts, these implement systems for teams to directly submit questions they routinely encounter to designated experts across the company. Treating it as an active cycle of inquiry rather than just generic ad-hoc task duties elevates people best equipped to provide qualified answers in an environment where anyone can easily find them, thus reducing the repetitive effort of your key persons.

For example, at a SaaS company, this could look like:

• The sales team submits questions about product functionality to the dedicated queue
• That gets routed to the right product manager or engineer to respond comprehensively
• The answer gets preserved and made available for future reference any time that query gets raised again

The key is building simple, automated escalations into these processes so questions naturally percolate to the appropriate cross-functional stakeholders. Rather than just hoping they happen to read the right Slack thread or document, it proactively pulls in expertise on an as-needed basis.

Companies can scope these systems narrowly at first, even across just a few key departmental interfaces. But done consistently, they provide a release valve to alleviate one of the biggest communication bottlenecks that bog down growth - constantly getting mired in repetitive cycles of gathering the same institutional knowledge from other groups. One illustrative example - in one of my previous jobs when this solution was adopted by Sales, CSM, and Support teams (approx 40 people) the outcome was that the Support team didn't have to hire one full-time employee which is a saving of 50-60k per year. Given the minimal investment, it's not a bad result.

While not nearly as enticing as delightful offsite retreats or bold cultural transformation initiatives, focused efforts to systematize this critical inter-team knowledge flow in lowkey ways can pay major dividends over time. It won't solve every issue companies face when transitioning from tightly-knit startups to larger enterprises. But it will help retain more of that secret startup sauce - the open flow of information, ideas, and energy unimpeded by formidable organizational boundaries.