In this era of business, you have to scale fast to stay standing. There is too much competition, and the big fish at the top seem to have bottomless pockets. Not to mention, AI is creating disruption in every field. Every CEO, every PE firm knows the drill: scale ASAP.
Nothing gets in the way of that goal, understandably. Growing pains are simply the cost of doing business.
But when companies scale at speed, operational complexity grows faster than headcount.
There’s no time to train new people.
No one can get everyone on the same page.
Leadership isn’t sure what’s happening on the ground.
Teams have little visibility into what other teams are working on across the program.
Some teams don’t even know a project is happening until they’re already behind on their scope.
The number of potential communication channels can be calculated using N × (N − 1) / 2, where N is the number of participants.
For one project with roughly 20 stakeholders involved, including internal SMEs, internal and external PMs, and the design team, that’s 190 potential communication channels. The PM acts as the main filter for information.
If each project adds 20 distinct stakeholders, five projects bring that number to 4,950 potential connections. Across 80 projects, it reaches 1,279,200.
Of course, stakeholders overlap, and not everyone needs to communicate with everyone else. These numbers illustrate how quickly the potential connections multiply, rather than the actual volume of communication.
Now consider a PM managing three projects. With 60 distinct stakeholders, that’s up to 1,770 potential connections. Without a system to support operations, too much of the responsibility for filtering information falls on one person.
When you scale fast, you often have fewer people managing more projects. Typically, you haven’t created a system to support them before adding to their load. At a smaller scale, traditional communication methods were reasonable: meetings, emails, Teams pings, and calls to get everyone on the same page.
But as that complexity grows, one person cannot reliably keep everything connected without a system supporting them. They will inevitably drop something, forget to loop in a stakeholder, or submit the BOM order late. We are human.
Yet in many companies, the responsibility still falls on the PM to deliver. The supporting structure stays the same, and the number of projects on their plate goes up.
Communication breaks down. Mistakes can cost millions.
On top of this, we ask PMs to fill in Excel sheets, PowerPoints, and clunky PM software so leadership can pull data and make charts showing how things are going.
They are overloaded with administrative work.
Solutions from leadership look like:
“Well, hire more people!”
“Well, give them AI so they can be more productive!”
It is extremely hard to find experts in our field. Even experts need to learn a new company’s way of doing things. This takes time and adds to the chaos when no one has time to train them. And that’s if you can find them in the first place.
AI cannot untangle that chaos on its own. If you give employees AI tools with no strategy behind them, you risk adding to it. Give ChatGPT a bad prompt, and you can get a bad answer. You have to create a structure AI can work within before it can make a reliable impact across your organization.
So scaling at speed comes with a lot of risk:
Cost overruns from mistakes and missed requirements.
Deadlines pushed out.
Unmet customer commitments.
Reputational damage from unreliable execution.
This is not a PM problem. This is a leadership problem.
If you ask PMs to perform the impossible, you must provide a supportive structure that enables them to act superhuman.
Put the whip away and think about how you can give before you ask for more.
Give them a repeatable process. Iron out cross-functional pain points. Build an operating system that tells them what needs to happen at each milestone, which stakeholders to engage, and which lessons from past projects to apply.
Automate reporting by building it into the operating system.
What does this do?
Expertise is built into the system, so you can broaden who you hire based on competency and potential, without requiring everyone to arrive with the same depth of experience.
Onboarding becomes easier because the process exists within the system, instead of living in someone else’s head.
Leadership has a clear view of what’s going on without relying on daily stand-ups or weekly PowerPoints from delivery teams.
Operations become more consistent across the portfolio.
Customer commitments become easier to meet.
And your team has the structure to deliver on the growth you’re asking for.
