It shouldn’t be news to anyone that, in today’s world, technology is a way of creating efficiencies in almost every process in manufacturing, industry, commerce, or services. As any new company sets out to create systems for introducing its product or service, having a “platform mindset” will enable it to achieve maximum scalability and efficiency.
A platform mindset is thinking about all the systems’ goals with intentionality: optimally extracting the most value from technology while maintaining a great culture, platforms, and tools well into the future. However, this must be done with a growth mindset, as there are no simple formulas, and it involves learning as you go.
It’s difficult to predict whether a company will grow since in real life most new businesses don’t flourish. You can be aware that, if the company does grow, you’ll need to think fast about solving the challenges in each area with an eye to scale, because artisanal 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 minimize mistakes is to be intentional about how to grow.
Building for Growth: How to Scale Your Startup Successfully
For example, a dog food business that starts out as a home-based business and suddenly becomes popular and needs to scale may have different priorities when it grows. It may need to open a better channel for active communication with customers, requiring specialized software. As the business grows, technology needs to change to support its processes and operations in an intentional and integrated way with the rest of the organization.
It’s a risk not paying attention to the fact that the company may suddenly grow bigger. If each team makes independent decisions and follows the same processes as when the company was a start-up, chaos will ensue.
For example, an employee performance review system that could handle 10 employees may not work so well when that number reaches 100. Why not? Perhaps Alex from HR would copy the names of the people from an employee registration spreadsheet into the review system, circulate the information between the involved parties, then manually transfer the reviews and comments back from the review system to the spreadsheet. However, with a much larger number of people, departments, and responses involved, this kind of workflow becomes burdensome and eventually becomes a “technical debt.”
The lack of integration between the employee registration and the performance review systems would be a nightmare. The list of employees to be evaluated may be incorrect, as it would depend on manual processes that are susceptible to error and not scalable.
Without a platform mindset permeating the company so that it develops new functionalities and systems in a conscious way, technical debts become obstacles to growth and the operation is compromised — even if the product or service is conceptually great. The accumulation of technical debt leads to a loss of productivity over time.
Building software with shortcuts but without attention to quality and the best way to implement each new feature can lead to an initial productivity gain. However, as would happen with a monetary debt, in the long term the interest accrues, and the technical debts significantly impact productivity.
Human resources processes scale with the number of employees; sales processes scale with the number of clients; operations processes scale with the number of suppliers; legal processes scale with the number of employees, clients, and offices. And logistics problems scale with the number of headquarters, clients, and employees. Many aspects take on a large scale as a company grows, and to meet this inexorable demand, the people in leadership roles must turn their minds to building an integrated technology area — using a platform mindset.
Having a senior technology professional on board as early as possible is key to carrying out these assessments. A technology manager who plays a leading role in a company’s early stages would be able to plan all the processes, both from the point of view of systems development and implementation and of building the team and defining management processes.
A technology manager hired by a company that has grown disorganized is left with the more laborious task of reviewing all the processes and, in most cases, revisiting the configuration of the team itself. They will have to deal with questions such as:
- Has the investment in technology paid off?
- Are people in the right roles?
- Are they working on projects that make sense for the company’s mission?
- Are there any bloated or understaffed teams?
- Are there any redundant projects in the different teams?
- Is technology working to reduce risks in operations years down the line?
What’s more, if each department in the company hires a few technology professionals to separately create 10 systems, you’ll end up with 10 problems. Each of these departments may be better locally than before, but the company overall will be in a situation far below its potential due to a lack of communication and integration.
Instead, to effectively scale your business in an integrated fashion, apply a platform mindset at the start-up phase and bring in a technology leader who can envision, communicate, and implement the mechanism that will facilitate growth and change. Viewing technology as a partner area fundamental to transforming and scaling your business will promote an integrated vision that includes an intention to scale and transform into the future.
Marcus Fontoura is the author of A Platform Mindset: Building a Culture of Collaboration (8080 Books).
