Let’s be honest: scaling a team is tough.
Hiring more people doesn’t always make things easier. Sometimes it makes things harder, slower delivery, more misalignment, and a culture that starts to feel like it's slipping out of your hands.
If you're growing fast, you’ve probably felt this. You’re trying to move forward without losing the clarity, pace, and way of working that got you here in the first place.
This isn’t a guide full of theory. It’s a real-world checklist: what we’ve seen work (and not work) across dozens of scaling teams, backed by actual data.
1. Culture Needs to Be Designed, Not Assumed
When teams are small, culture is often intuitive. You talk often. Everyone’s in the loop. But as you grow, culture becomes something you need to design, intentionally.
Gartner found that organizations with strong cultural connectedness see up to 37% better performance and 36% higher retention.
This isn’t about values on a poster. It’s about how decisions are made, how feedback is shared, and how teams handle pressure.
What helps:
- Be explicit about what good teamwork looks like.
- Reinforce that in how you onboard, run retros, and promote.
- Don’t wait for culture to “scale”, build the systems that will carry it forward.
2. Process Doesn’t Mean Slowing Down
It’s easy to assume that more structure will kill your speed. But scaling without process is where delivery actually starts to break.
McKinsey calls this out: clear, repeatable ways of working reduce friction and keep velocity high.
What helps:
- Create simple workflows that reduce rework and ambiguity.
- Standardize what should be repeatable, especially around testing and releases.
- Keep your tooling and practices consistent across pods or teams, but adaptable.
3. Communication Breaks First
This is usually the first thing to go when a team grows quickly. Messages get missed. Context gets lost. People stop asking questions and start assuming.
Gartner points out that poor internal communication is one of the top causes of misalignment in growing teams.
What helps:
- Over-communicate priorities, especially when things shift.
- Encourage asynchronous updates to reduce meeting load.
- Don’t rely on osmosis, build systems that keep everyone informed, no matter where they sit.
A Note on How You Scale
One thing we’ve seen work again and again: don’t try to scale everything at once.
Stagger your growth. Start with areas that are holding delivery back—like QA, data engineering, or release management, and plug in support that adapts to your flow, not the other way around.
This is where flexible staffing models shine, especially when they’re close to your timezone, speak your language (literally and culturally), and don’t require a 6-month ramp just to contribute.
Final Thought
Scaling doesn’t have to mean more chaos. But it does require you to be more deliberate, about how you build, how you lead, and how you protect what makes your team strong.
You don’t need perfect systems. You need just enough clarity and support to keep people moving in the same direction, fast.
One More Thing
At Akurey, we work with growing teams to help them scale without breaking what makes them great.
We embed directly inside your team, plug the real gaps, backend, QA, data, and help you keep delivering without losing your rhythm or your culture. We’ve done it on 250+ projects, from early-stage startups to high-compliance industries.
If you’re growing and want support that moves at your pace and respects how your team works, we’d love to talk.