How to Successfully Scale Your Team

Most startups have growth in mind, but there is one crucial phase that every startup goes through that can determine success: scaling from a team to an organization.

shape charge | Getty Images

Leading a global customer success organization, I’ve grown my team from a few dozen people to a few hundred people over the past two years. While our growth was rapid, the leadership team and I were focused on how to effectively and efficiently scale our organization to grow our small customer success team into a global powerhouse.

So let’s talk about how to responsibly and successfully scale through the lens of a customer success leader. Even if you don’t work in customer success, you can apply these principles to any type of hypergrowth team in general.

Small teams have many advantages – the communication channels are short, the bureaucratic effort is low and new processes and functions are developed quickly.

Let’s look at the beginnings of monday.com as an example. Roles were generalized and there was a customer success manager responsible for the entire lifecycle of an account, from onboarding to renewal. Being involved in all stages, this person became a knowledge base in its own right and could move quickly. However, it eventually became unsustainable for one person to manage the entire process.

See also: Not sure how to grow your team? Focus on these 3 things.

create specializations

As our organization grew, we reached a tipping point and realized the need to move into specializations. Gradually we have created specializations based on where our customers’ needs are greatest.

We started with a customer success manager who was responsible for the entire lifecycle of an account, including tickets, implementation, onboarding and more. It became clear that this role required in-depth expertise, so we divided it into a reactive role and a proactive role.

• reactive role: Customer Experience Managers contacted by customers to resolve technical issues, bugs, etc.

• proactive role: Customer Success Managers who manage the account from a business perspective and build relationships with the customer.

Later we further split the roles based on our customers needs and created a separate role for the account onboarding phase and another role for the renewal phase. Each role is specialized and allows employees to become experts in the role, which helps us deliver higher quality services.

You can split specializations in two ways:

• Account Lifecycle: Different roles are responsible for different stages in an account’s lifecycle. This can include roles such as onboarding and renewal managers.

• Product maturity and complexity: A complex and mature product means there is too much information about features and capabilities that a single person could not hold. You may want different roles specializing in different areas of the product.

Whichever approach you choose, with deep specialization comes great responsibility. Before opening a new specialization, consider what types of bureaucracy, barriers, or duplicate processes it might create, and make a plan in advance to avoid this.

See also: Tim Ferriss explains how to scale your business in 3 steps

Challenges that come with scaling and specializations

Here are some of the key challenges we’ve identified with scaling and specialization that we’ve addressed head-on:

Complex workflows: As the team grew and became more specialized, more complex workflows and processes involving more stakeholders came into play. There can often be a steep learning curve when it comes to creating, implementing, and maintaining these complexities.

A key factor in the successful implementation of these new workflows was maintaining business continuity to ensure customers were not negatively impacted during the transition period. For example, we needed to manage the handoff from an onboarding manager to a customer success manager while maintaining the same level of trust and continuity with the customer.

Organizational efficiency: We’ve taken the time to evaluate our new processes to ensure they don’t introduce inefficiencies and duplication. Although we were moving quickly, we constantly evaluated our work and relied on data to measure our progress, effectiveness and impact.

Whenever we implemented a new process, we continuously tracked our KPIs to see the real impact of the new process and made adjustments accordingly. For example, we evaluated how the change in workflow affected customer satisfaction.

Onboarding new employees: Investing in an employee onboarding process could have been low on our priority list as we were keen to onboard quickly. But the onboarding process was crucial in the long run. It promoted efficiency, made the new teammates feel part of the team, and cultivated motivation to succeed in the role.

Now our onboarding process includes a general onboarding where they learn about the culture and values ​​of the company to feel more connected to the mission. Each role then participates in a specialized onboarding where they learn about the product and business in a way relevant to their role. The onboarding process plays an invaluable role in increasing employee retention rates and creating a soft, welcoming landing at the company.

Related: 4 Keys to Growing and Scaling Your Startup

Responsibly and consciously scaling is key to maintaining business continuity through growth. Creating Specializations can help your organization tremendously in scaling, but you must understand the challenges involved and be prepared to address them as they arise.