How to Ease Growing Pains

As companies get bigger, even child companies (brands, if you prefer), there comes a time when the startup mentality might not be helpful. Here are five ways to make dealing with success easier.

1. Recognize that management is a skill.
   • As you have more development teams, it becomes harder to focus everyone toward the same goal. Good management does that.
2. Hire a COO.
   • It makes sense for young companies to emphasize product development and sales over operations. However, there comes a point when it is more important to hone operations and remove any and all sloppiness.
   • “Customers have to be sure you can deliver.” – Robert Shar
   • Midsized Companies Can’t Afford Operational Glitches
3. Get comfortable saying no.
   • Don’t take on every project that comes your way. Really think about the odds of success. Focus on what is important to your business.
4. Be focused on always getting better at what you already do.
   • New projects can be an unreliable route to growth.
   • “You have to get out of that mode of doing everything differently and turn to repetitive sets of tasks performed by people that become more and more expert in them.” – Derek Lidow
5. Understand that it is not do or die.
   • If you lack clear strategy then there is nothing wrong with focusing on what is already working for you.

The above is a ripoff from your-awkward-phase-and-why-you-should-love-it.

The Paradox of Success

The “paradox of success” can be summed up in four phases:

1. When we have clarity of purpose, it enables us to succeed at our endeavor.
2. When we have success, we gain a reputation as a “go to” person. We are presented with increased options and opportunities.
3. When we have increased options and opportunities, we have increased demands upon our time and energies, it leads to diffused efforts.
4. We become distracted from what would otherwise be our highest level of contribution. The effect of our success has been to undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

The pursuit of success can be a catalyst for failure.
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Success can distract us from focusing on the essential things that produce success in the first place.

Software Architects Need Feedback

"Typically, [architects] are farmed out to various projects as consultants, with the aim of ensuring that the project takes off on the right track and avoids mistakes it might make without the wisdom of the consultants. The intent of this practice is laudable, but the outcome is usually sobering: because the consultants are so valuable, having given their advice, they are moved to the next project long before implementation is finished, let alone testing and delivery. By the time the consultants have moved on, any problems with their earlier sage advice are no longer their problems, but the problems of a project they have long since left behind. In other words, the consultants never get to live through the consequences of their own design decisions, which is a perfect way to breed them into incompetence. The way to keep designers sharp and honest is to make them eat their own dog food. Any process that deprives designers of that feedback is ultimately doomed to failure."

from API: Design Matters