Growth

Introduction

Working a sufficiently growing environment as is often the case in the tech industry poses a lot of challenges. One such challenge is to form a common understanding about what growth means for the organization.

Growth is a material increase in economic production and consumption.

In this post I want to explore how I navigate that topic in my role as a Technical Director at Edurino.

About Growth

One of the perks of working in an evolving environment is that we are constantly building new systems and processes. But we cannot just build new infrastructure all day as this would create too much weight to carry moving forward. After all every system, every piece of infrastructure and every process requires maintenance to keep them running, training to keep every one informed and advocacy to keep everyone engaged.

To find this interesting and to not run out of breath we need to have very little attachment to what we do and very high attachment to what we want to achieve.

As a result we know we are building everything for the moment. We accept everything we build is legacy and out of date a priori.

What Growth does to an Organization

Were we to maintain all the systems we build it would increase the demand for communication and alignment to the point were we lose all agility and cannot react to changed requirements anymore.

Adding more and more responsibilities to our organization then would scatter our focus, put a lot of responsibility on a select few. Hiring talent to spread the responsibility takes a lot of time. This is a non-solution as it drastically increases operating cost and only postpones the issue to where the complexity and size of the operation becomes too complex overall.

What do you do to adjust?

If building and subsequent abandonment is the nature of the beast, everyone in the organization needs to understand and live that. So we need to form and 'cement' a common understanding of our values within the company.

Objviously when you abandon a system or process, you have good reasoning and let's hope data to back your decision up. You should share the insights and live transparency and open communication. This reduces chances of the involved people feeling overruled or ignored.

To enable a swift change we aim to document a little too much and if anything overcommunicate the reasoning why we abandon a system and what the new requirements are.