Growing Up Without Slowing Down
There is a recurring inflection point in a startup’s journey where there’s an overwhelming sense that you need to “grow up”. Too many people have been hired for everyone to be in the room when decisions get made and one person can’t hold the whole company in their head any longer or approve every single deal. Leadership knows that the business needs structure and processes, but this is almost always accompanied by a fear of losing the agility that got them to this point. Visions of bureaucracy, red tape, and ten approvals to get anything done make the idea of growing up unappealing.
When this point arrives, most leaders veer down one of two paths. Some avoid adding process for as long as humanly possible. Chaos compounds and leaders stay bottlenecks that slow things down anyways. Others overcorrect so hard they become the thing they feared without intending to, process gets bolted on in reaction to every mistake and the key people who helped them grow start leaving out of frustration.
These paths both fail and come from the same misunderstanding: that growing up and moving fast are opposites, and that you have to pick one. You don’t. Adding process is a natural evolution of a business's growth and you can do it without bogging your people down if it’s built for the right reason.
Process Should Serve Your People
You’ve probably heard discussion around people, process and technology; the idea that these three things all need to be working together to run a business well. I’d put it slightly differently. Your process and technology exist to serve your people. You hire people for their knowledge, judgement, and values and then you give them the process and tools that make their work easier. You don’t hire people to fit into your systems.
That order matters more in SaaS than almost anywhere else, because your people are the company. They’re its DNA. Anything that treats them as a risk to be managed, rather than the reason your business succeeds, is going to be quietly working against you.
So if not to control, what is process actually for? It gives your people the rules of the game. It’s near impossible to play well if you don’t know the rules or what winning looks like. But once you do, you can move quickly and make your own calls because you know what’s in bounds and what isn’t.
The challenge is that most people hear the word “process” and immediately picture rules and checklists to control how everything gets done. That version of process stifles people. They eventually get bored, stop engaging, and the risk-taking and experimenting that were so critical in the early days of a business disappear altogether. They lose the autonomy that made agility possible in the first place.
The checklist below gives you steps and checkpoints, but ultimately your intention matters more than anything. If you build a process to clarify, chaos is reduced and you continue to move quickly. If you build it to control people, it will become the exact thing you were afraid of.
How to Build Processes That Enable
The checklist below helps build processes in the right place with the right intention. The first few steps are about putting structure where it’s actually needed and removing bottlenecks and sources of chaos. The last few focus on building process in a way that prevents it from becoming red tape.
Separate The Big Things from Little Things
Not everything needs a process. The people you hired are smart; trust them to do their jobs. Put guardrails only on the decisions that are genuinely big. The ones that are hard to reverse, cross multiple teams, or sit above a real dollar threshold. On everything else, let your people just move.
This is the step that does the most work, so it’s worth slowing down on. Doing it correctly keeps the majority of decisions close to the people doing the day-to-day work which is where they are made best, while still ensuring that the few things that could actually hurt the business get a second set of eyes.
Most companies approach process by guarding everything with an equal approach, which is exactly what makes everything feel slow. Focus your efforts on key areas and decisions, and everything will feel much easier.
Be Clear on Decision Rights
Once you have the big things, make it unambiguous who decides. This is what “knowing the rules of the game” actually looks like day to day. Nobody should have to wonder whether a call is theirs to make or where they can exercise judgement. When that is fuzzy, even your best people will freeze and default to routing things upward which recreates the bottleneck you are trying to get rid of.
This doesn’t need to be, and really shouldn’t be, elaborate. A short list of key decisions, who owns each one and who needs to be looped in suffices. The point is for it to become second nature and everything that isn’t on the list is just business as usual.
Build Process with People Who Do The Work
People resist process when it doesn’t match how the work actually happens or when they had no say in shaping it. If you bring the people who do the work into building your process, two things change. First, they understand the why behind it. This is critical because edge cases will always show up and someone who gets the intent is better equipped to use their judgement in those scenarios. Second, they’ll actually follow the process. If you change the way someone works without involving them, it’s human nature to drift back to old habits because they often seem easier to those doing the work.
It may be faster to write the process yourself and hand it down, but if that’s quietly ignored after a month it really isn’t a process at all.
Audit Your Reflex When Something Goes Wrong
This is the one that quietly turns companies into the thing they feared. Something goes wrong, and the instinct is to bolt on a step so it “never happens again”. Do that enough times and you’ll end up inadvertently building a red-tape, approval maze one well-meaning rule at a time.
When a mistake happens, default to a conversation, not a new control. Process isn’t a mechanism to point fingers. If someone took a risk inside the guardrails you set and it didn’t pan out, talk it through, learn from it and move on. Keeping the agility and risk-taking valued in startups means accepting that people will occasionally get it wrong. If you remove that, the speed you move at will go along with it.
Keep It Simple
Process is not documenting everything. Over-documenting is a surefire way to make sure people don’t read any of it or check out. Keep your documentation limited to the things that genuinely change the outcome. There are a hundred ways to get to the same place, and if the route doesn’t matter, it doesn’t need to be written down. You’re not trying to regulate every move someone makes; you’re trying to point everyone at the same outcome and trust them to find their way there.
Make It Easy & Review Regularly
When you do write something down, it has to live somewhere people can actually find it. If they have to dig, they won’t. And it only takes one out-of-date process to make people quietly stop trusting all of them.
So give it a home, make the new way easier than the old habit, and put a regular review on the calendar. Process isn’t something you set once and walk away from – it’s a living system, and should continue to evolve as the business does.
Where to Start
The fear of growing up inherently isn’t about process, it’s about slowing down and losing the things that made you great. But this only happens if you put in place the wrong structure, built to control instead of clarify. Build it the other way, and process becomes the reason one hundred people can move at the same speed that ten people in a room did at the beginning.
Growing up without slowing down isn’t a system you install overnight. Instead, it’s a handful of clear calls that give your people room to keep doing the things you hired them for.
What’s the one approval you wish you could stop being part of? That’s usually the best place to start.
