Scaling Without Compromise

Maintaining a Culture of High Performance as You Grow an Engineering Team

I recently gave this talk to founders at portfolio companies of Essence VC, focused on a problem that tends to surface right as things are going well: the early sense of speed, clarity, and cohesion starts to fade as an engineering team grows.

Early teams often feel magical. Decisions are fast. Information flows freely. People seem to know what you want without being told. Then headcount increases, delivery slows, communication gets noisier, and getting everyone on the same page feels like an insurmountable task.

The post below explores why that happens and what leaders can do about it. You can also find the slides for my talk below.

Why Early Teams Accomplish so Much

High performing early teams tend to share a common feel. Work moves quickly with little ceremony. Decisions happen informally. Everyone seems to know what’s going on, even when priorities shift.

That feeling isn’t accidental, and it isn’t just about how talented your early team is (though it helps!). It’s the product of reinforcing dynamics that emerge during the early days of a startup.

Early on, team size does a lot of work for you. People spend time together constantly. There are no defined boundaries between roles. Information is shared organically, and the distance between a decision and its execution is short. You don’t need systems to create alignment because proximity does it for you.

Who you hire also matters. Early employees are often deeply mission aligned, comfortable operating without permission, and biased toward action in the face of ambiguity. Many of them may go start their own company one day. These are not people waiting to be told what to do.

How you hire reinforces this. Early teams are usually built from your immediate network: former coworkers, trusted referrals, or people who stood out strongly enough to overcome an informal bar. 

This hiring pool gets you values alignment, almost completely for free. There’s a shared understanding of what “good engineering” looks like, and people show up already bought into doing things that way.

Communication is largely unintentional but effective. Information flows through hallway conversations, quick Slack messages, and shared context. Gaps get filled quickly because everyone has a relatively holistic view of the system.

From these conditions, a few powerful properties emerge. Explicit accountability is rare, yet output is reliable. Responsibilities stay fluid, even across functions. And it can feel like the team can read your mind.

What Changes as You Scale

As companies grow, performance doesn’t dissapear per se, but these early stage dynamics propping it up, start to fade. You no longer get reinforcement for free.

Your relationship to the organization shifts first. You can no longer spend meaningful time with everyone. You stop touching every part of the system. The number of people you need to engage with grows faster than your available attention, and focused work time gives way to calendar gymnastics.

At the same time, your team’s experience changes. Newer employees will never have had the entire company in their head. Their scope is necessarily narrower. Decisions that affect their work are often made by people they’ve never met. The intuitive alignment that came from proximity fades.

Recruiting changes too. You exhaust your immediate network just as headcount becomes a constraint on delivery. Pressure builds to hire faster. The conversation subtly shifts from “is this person cut from the same cloth?” to “can this person do the job?”

And who you attract changes. Later hires are often more domain driven, more craft focused, and operating with moderate, rather than extreme, agency. None of this is bad. But it is different.

The Impact of Those Changes

These shifts create second order effects that many teams experience before they can articulate what’s happening.

Communication starts to degrade. Messages become noisier. Strategy and priorities are interpreted inconsistently. Teams begin talking more about communication processes than about outcomes.

Accountability becomes harder at exactly the wrong time. Values alignment becomes less binary just as the amount of accountability required skyrockets, while your ability to personally enforce it decreases.

Culture begins to drift. New hires take months to acclimate. Without clear expectations, people fill in the gaps themselves. This happens slowly, but it compounds, and by the time it’s visible, it’s often well established.

At this point, many organizations respond by treating symptoms. They add process. They add meetings. They add layers. This makes outcomes more predictable, but at the cost of speed and scope of impact. The trade off for this predictability is friction that slows things down and disincentivizes initiative.

The root issue, though, usually isn’t process. It’s that the dynamics changed, but the tools you use didn’t.

What You Can Do

Scaling headcount does not inherently reduce performance. BUT, it does change the dynamics within your team, subtly encouraging a lower bar. Maintaining high performance at scale requires intentional counterweights.

Your first task is to define your engineering values, not as a public facing artifact, but as a stable document that captures what you actually believe. These should be opinionated. Clear. And written by you. If they aren’t at least a little polarizing at an industry level, they probably won’t guide real decisions.

Effective values do more than point in a direction. They communicate degree. They help resolve disagreements. And they remain stable even as the organization changes.

Once defined, those values need constant reinforcement. Decisions aren’t finished when they’re made, they’re finished when everyone understands them. That means repeating yourself more than feels necessary, writing down inflection points in lightweight ways, and actively confirming understanding. Feeling like you’re saying the same thing over and over is usually a sign you’re doing it right.

Hiring deserves special attention. Under pressure, values alignment is often the first thing to slip because it’s hard to measure and easy to rationalize away. Your values should show up explicitly in how you evaluate candidates, as signals you seek, tradeoffs you’re willing to make, and reasons you’re willing to say no, even when it hurts.

Clarity alone, however, isn’t enough. Culture is maintained through accountability. Values tell you where to go; accountability keeps you on course. This work is uncomfortable, but essential. Correct misalignment early. Make it clear that the underlying values driving your organization are not up for debate.

Finally, elevate your standard bearers. Call out aligned behavior publicly. Give greater scope to people who embody your values. Push them to have more impact without forcing it. Culture spreads through their visible examples far more effectively than through documents.

Signs You’re On or Off Track

There are a few patterns that tend to emerge when things are drifting. Priorities feel unclear. Tribes form. Teams push for solutions that treat symptoms rather than the underlying problems.

Conversely, when things are working, you’ll feel like you’re constantly repeating yourself. Values are broadly understood, and accountability diffuses tension rather than creating it. The system becomes more resilient, even if the number of fires doesn’t decrease (you have more people and projects after all).

Your experience as a leader will also feel different. That discomfort isn’t a failure, it’s often a sign that you’re operating at the right level.

Closing Thoughts

Scaling doesn’t kill high performance. Unmanaged dynamics do.

Early teams benefit from conditions that don’t scale automatically. As those conditions fade, leaders have to replace them with deliberate structures: clear values, consistent communication, aligned hiring, and real accountability.

Finally, if parts of this feel difficult to operationalize, as a Fractional VP of Engineering, I help startups through this transition. Let’s set up some time, and we can work together to bridge your next stage of growth!