- Have devleads as the central crux for every major decision. Screw "senior" management - make sure that the people who are at the codeface every day are part

- Have devleads as the central crux for every major decision. Screw "senior" management - make sure that the people who are at the codeface every day are part of the major discussions - that those people need to be persuaded of the need for product X or pivot Y. Because they do whether you treat them like it or not. - the above means you are "surfacing" politics. Do not keep the backbiting and infighting amoung a cabal of senior managers who talk to each other a lot. Make it public - Have one place to have these discussions - an email list probably, and the only way to get your project signed off is to get agreement on this list (well, Ok the CTO can have some veto power - this is not a democracy of course) - Analysis really works. Publish one-page analysis of the proposed project. Watch it get destroyed with evidence and laughter and then watch even better ideas get proposed. In short scaling is a political problem - treat it like one. And engineer the horror out of politics. Democracy and transparency are pretty good at that. Edit: Buidling a business IMO has strategic, operational and tactical levels. Strategy should be obvious, be PMF and be well known in the company (a PC on every Desktop). Most of the article is tactics - hiring, metrics, stack etc. The hard part is often operational - and that is almost always orgabisation design and that is about communication, alignment of resources, trade offs, etc etc. That's hard. Dysfunctional organisations blow this. Open politics fights dysfunction