Systems over Heroes

You are finally growing... but are there rocks ahead?

Your vague idea is a success and has become something people want. From day one you have lovingly managed every aspect of the business - from engineering to design, sales and customer support. Your dream is growing, and you find it challenging to let go. You know businesses fail from poor market fit and inability to grow revenues. You want to remain close to all the details - you don’t like handing over your baby to other people. However your well-meaning attention quickly becomes a bottleneck in decision-making, causing you to miss opportunities for innovation and simultaneously overwhelm and demotivate employees.

Principle

What went wrong here?

In the early stages of a startups and products, heroic efforts drive success. Heroes are the passionate one-stop-shop individuals who work tirelessly, wear multiple hats, and push boundaries to get their product into the hands of customers.

However, as your team grows, relying on heroic acts becomes neither individually sustainable nor economically scalable. Before successfully embarking on a growth phase, an organization needs to evolve from relying on heroes to relying on systems.

Creating systems means building robust, repeatable structures, norms and processes that ensure long-term success… whilst avoiding adding system complexity, hindering processes, and unneeded transformation pain.

This balanced shift is essential for scaling operations, maintaining revenue growth, and fostering a collaborative environment where everyone can contribute to their fullest potential without burning out.

So before you scale, remember you can’t do it all! Instead throw some of your boundless enthusiasm and energy towards deciding the following*:

• Division of labour: Who does what, when and how? As you add more people, create an explicit and fair system that empowers people in your growing team to own a domain.
• Decision making responsibilities: Who can decide what, and in what circumstances? The earlier that you agree on that, the smoother your scaling adventure will be
• Simple, value-focussed structure: How does value flow across teams? Make a simple structure that allows value to get out the door with the lowest possible lead time.
• Coordination: How will the different humans / teams coordinate? How is information to be shared? How will you maintain transparency?
• Automation: What processes can you automate now, to save you time, energy and cash later?

• Before you do ANY of this, however, you must first assess your overburdensome complexities. Ask yourself: what will break / become exponentially more pain full / inefficient when we double in size? Triple in size? Do not pass GO,?do not onboard any more paying customers: until you simplify those crunch points.

Example

Consider a tech startup that has just launched its first product. The founder and CTO has been working late nights, personally fixing bugs and deploying updates. The CMO spends weekends tweaking marketing campaigns. Meanwhile, the CEO is under pressure to acquire more users for the next investment round, but fears that costs will soon outstrip revenue. They all resent the grueling hours whilst also fear others won’t do the job right and privately may even savor the sense of indispensability. These heroic efforts are crucial in the beginning, but they quickly become a bottleneck as the customer base and company grow.

To evolve to the next stage, the company needs to understand its current systems, simplify them, and reflect on what it needs to become. Even in the middle of a race, there are moments when you need to pause to tie your laces. So they step back, develop automated testing, setup deployment pipelines, invest in marketing automation tools, and lay the foundations for growth. Additional engineers are hired, and specialized, empowered teams are created with clear responsibilities. Code is refactored to be more maintainable and scalable, and marketing strategies are streamlined to ensure consistent and targeted outreach. Investments are made to ensure costs scale effectively. This transition not only reduces dependency on single individuals but also improves overall efficiency and scalability of the company.

As a result, the company is organizationally healthier, fewer crises, fewer frantic weekend emails, sustainable workloads, and critically for our investors, scalable margins.

“Systems run the business, and people run the systems." — Michael Gerber

However...

Sometimes, even when a company is scaling, heroic efforts are necessary in critical moments when quick, decisive action is required.

• Critical bug is discovered the week of a big product launch. The development team pulls an all-nighter to fix it. While their heroic effort saves the day, and an existing robust quality assurance system prevents last-minute chaos.
• Retail company faces a sudden supply chain disruption before the holiday season. The logistics manager secures alternative suppliers through sheer determination. However, a resilient supply chain system with built-in redundancies could have mitigated the risk without frantic last-minute solutions.
• During a major promotional event, a company experiences a surge in customer inquiries. The customer support team works around the clock to handle the volume. While their dedication is invaluable, an advanced customer support system with AI-driven chatbots and automated responses could have managed the volume more efficiently.

So this should be the exception rather than the rule. Good working systems should be the champion of the day, to allow our heroes to have the time and energy to focus on success at a sustainable pace. And every heroic moment should be a learning experience to avoid in the future.

So, while we mostly value Systems over the Heroes, what we really focus on is Value Over Everything.

More reading?

• https://www.amazon.co.uk/Team-Teams-Rules-Engagement-Complex/dp/1591847486
• https://hbr.org/2020/11/building-organizational-resilience

Over to you...

What are your thoughts and experiences with transitioning from heroic efforts to systematic processes? How have you ensured sustainable growth in your organization?

Authors