Case study
How a fast-growing technology company scaled its leadership
A company growing fast through hiring and acquisition, whose communication habits hadn't grown with it.
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Background
A SaaS company operating across the US and Europe was growing quickly, through both hiring and acquisition. Many of its people had come from small teams.
Growth brought more layers, more meetings and more dependencies — and communication habits that had worked well at a smaller scale were no longer keeping up.
The challenge
“What worked when we were 100 people wasn't working when we were 500.” — Client sponsor
Too much time was going into discussing how the company worked rather than getting the work done. Managers needed to recognize that their natural style wasn't necessarily the style their new, larger teams needed.
The Discflow approach
Core 2.0 across the organization as a shared foundation.
Leader 2.0 for managers.
Group 2.0 for leadership and team sessions.
The real moment of change
Reviewing how different members of the leadership team approached decisions, one senior leader recognized they were creating a bottleneck by wanting to be involved in every one.
Another realized that giving people more context worked better than giving them more instructions.
What changed
Greater clarity about who owns which decisions.
Faster decision-making, with fewer escalations.
Managers more deliberate about how they communicated with different teams.
New managers joining with a shared framework from the start.
In their words
“I started asking myself what the team needed from me, rather than what came naturally to me.” — Manager
The value wasn't in knowing everyone's profile. It was in changing what we did with that information.
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