Technical Debt, Modern Operations and Staying Agile in High Growth Businesses

Scale-ups are critical

Scale-Ups are critical to the success of the UK Tech Sector – but “scaling up” presents a unique set of challenges different to ones facing Start-Ups. Start-Ups are all about experimenting and pivoting to achieve “product/market fit” – the near mythical intersection of customer need with a great solution that leads to growing demand for your product.

But as you cross-over between Start-Up and Scale-Up you suddenly have a different set of challenges – for example, you have a growing customer base who expect 100% up-time, the seamless release of new features and instant responses to their customer service queries. Plus if you’ve taken significant Series-A or Series-B funding you probably now have a Investors and a Board who want to see smooth growth with no bumps in the road.But what is the most common, and most deadly bump in the road?

According to the research in the StartUp Genome Report (2011), most Start-Ups don’t fail they self-destruct. And the #1 reason is “Premature Scaling”

Premature Scaling

Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform worse. They tend to lose the battle early on by getting ahead of themselves. Startups can prematurely scale their team, their customer acquisition strategies or over build the product.

Assuming you avoid the “premature scaling trap” DevOpsGroup’s experience with helping Start-Ups become Scale-Ups identifies 3 common problems

Paralysis trap

Each of these leads to what we call the “paralysis trap” – you have to spend more and more time just to stay in the same place. Given that most scale-ups are aiming for exponential growth, hitting a plateau of growth is not ideal.

The presentation, whitepaper and supporting diagrams walks through each of these paralysis traps, and offers some guidance and suggestions on how to address each one.

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