Dealing with scale and technical debt in a company

It’s difficult to predict whether a company will ever grow since most new businesses don’t flourish to that point in real life. If a company does grow, the leadership then needs to consider how to solve its challenges in each area with an eye to scale, because quick solutions tend to be chaotic to manage in the long term — and mistakes in a small company have very different consequences than mistakes in companies that already operate at scale. 

The best way to avoid this type of scenario is to be intentional about how to grow a business and when to change processes once a company is no longer a start-up. 

For example, an employee performance review system that could handle 100 employees in the beginning may not work so well once that number reaches 1,000.  Why not? Perhaps, at some point, Alex Smith from HR would copy names from an employee registration spreadsheet into the review system, circulate the information between the involved parties, and then manually transfer the reviews and comments back from the review system into the spreadsheet. However, with a larger number of employees, departments, and responses collected, this kind of workflow is flawed, susceptible to error, not scalable, and eventually becomes a technical debt. 

Over time, an accumulation of technical debt leads to a loss of productivity and can turn into an obstacle to growth. 

Time to grow

Many aspects take on a large scale as a company grows, and to meet this inexorable demand, managers in leadership roles should plan to build an integrated technology area.

In today’s world, technology is a way of creating efficiencies in almost every process in manufacturing, industry, commerce, or services. And this is even more relevant for those businesses preparing to expand.

Each company grows differently and has different needs from the moment it starts scaling up. For some companies, the turning point in growth is when an IPO occurs, due to the new influx of capital. Will new areas be created? If so, is there a structure in place to accommodate them? 

More and more options are emerging to support expansion without an in-house technology department, such as contracting third-party services using cloud-based SAAS (software-as-a-service) solutions. Depending on the size of the company and its plans, this can end up becoming an effective permanent solution. It can also be a useful alternative for a few years until the process becomes more complex and the priorities or the business model itself change.