Why Fast-Growing Companies Start Breaking Down
Structure for Speed: Building Process for People Who Hate Process
If you're leading a growth company, your edge is speed. So the last thing you want to hear is that what you need now is "process." I mean, process sounds slow and bureaucratic. And most likely, the opposite of what got you here.
But the kind of process I’m talking about? It’s the difference between scaling and stalling. It separates the companies that maintain momentum from those that get stuck firefighting.
And if you’re a VP of Sales, Product, or Customer Success, this isn't just a leadership article. This is how you operate like the exec your CEO can build around. The people who grow with the business are the ones who stop thinking about their lane and start shaping the system around them.
I’ve seen it at $2 million and at $100 million ARR. Strong teams grinding out work, but without a system to support them. The result is always the same: avoidable friction that slows everything down.
This article is about minimizing that friction.
We’ll unpack:
What organizational drag really looks like beneath the surface
Why “people problems” are often just process gaps in disguise
What to fix if you want your org to feel faster, lighter, and easier to scale
Let’s get into it.
Where Growth Actually Breaks
When growth slows down, most teams zoom in: improve messaging, optimize top-of-funnel, bring in a new sales rep, hire a new department leader. These feel like strategic moves, but they all assume the machine underneath is working. Often, it’s not. The machine isn’t underpowered. It’s out of sync.
The problem isn’t the people or the tactics. It’s that every team is solving for a different thing. Sales is chasing one outcome. Product another. Marketing a third. No one is wrong, but no one is coordinated. That’s not a messaging issue. It’s a systems issue.
At first, it appears to be small misses, but soon it drags the whole system:
Marketing builds MQL engines no one follows up on
Sales works around enablement decks and invents their own stories
Product builds features based on gut feel or a few anecdotes
Customer Success spends hours resetting expectations with clients who were sold something different
There’s no shared definition of the buyer. No feedback loop to connect what’s working in the field to what gets prioritized upstream. No institutional memory. Just smart people doing their best, in silos.
Alignment isn’t about weekly All-Hands. It’s about building the system that keeps every team learning from the same inputs and executing toward the same goals.
How Siloed Thinking Shows Up in Execution
Inside most growing companies, the story shifts depending on who you ask. Product talks about scale. Marketing talks about brand. Sales talks about pain points. Customer Success talks about gaps between promise and delivery. Ask five people who your ideal customer is, and you’ll get five well-informed answers, but they probably won’t match.
The burden to make sense of it all falls on the CEO. Every time.
Your employees aren’t the problem. However, each department, optimizing for its own worldview, often is. Without a shared framework, even high performers end up misaligned. Everyone’s doing their job, but solving for different outcomes.
And if no one has built the shared framework that defines the buyer, the lifecycle, and the internal rituals that turn insight into action, the default becomes intuition. And everyone builds their own version of the system.
This kind of misalignment can be hard to spot, yet it becomes evident in day-to-day interactions. More meetings. Slower handoffs. Rising tension between teams that used to click. The work hasn’t changed, but it’s taking more out of everyone.
The Sale Closes. The System Falls Apart.
Most companies don’t have a strong sales motion, but they do spend more time on it than on any other part of the customer journey. Messaging gets debated. Pipeline stages get renamed. Slide decks get updated. But ask what happens after a deal is signed, and things get fuzzy fast.
Just ask the client. The handoff between Sales and Customer Success was unclear. The scope was incomplete. No one could articulate exactly what was promised, why the buyer said yes, or how success would be measured. The team stepping in to deliver is left trying to reverse engineer a deal they didn’t help close.
Customer Success, frustrated, rewrites onboarding as they go. Sales moves on to the next opportunity, only to get dragged back into delivery calls to referee what was said. And the buyer, the one you worked so hard to win, is left trying to reconstruct the version of reality they thought they bought.
These kinds of breakdowns are one of the biggest reasons health tech growth stalls. Read how the best companies address them and keep momentum: Why Health Tech Growth Stalls and How the Best Companies Break Through.
This isn’t some rare breakdown. It’s the default. Sales capture buyer insights, but they often get buried in call notes or lost entirely. Delivery teams start each implementation from scratch. No one has built a system to carry the logic of the sale into the rest of the customer journey.
What looked like momentum during the sales process turns into drag. Clients may still get value, but it takes more effort, more follow-up, and more clarification than it should. And the moment when clients have to remind your team what they said, or feel like they’re leading the process themselves, they start to lose confidence. That’s when expansion slows and renewal risk rises.
If you’re seeing this, it’s not because your people aren’t trying. It’s because they’re doing it without the necessary structure.
Structure Is What Makes Speed Repeatable
The irony of growth-stage execution is that the faster teams move, the more fractured things get. Deals move forward before anyone downstream is ready. Onboarding starts without clear expectations. Product launches without knowing what was actually sold. Everyone is in motion, but no one is in sync. The client feels it first. But over time, the bigger cost is to the company’s growth itself.
This is not about effort. It is that the pace has outgrown the way the company operates. Without structure, every new deal adds friction instead of creating scale.
Fixing that does not require a full reinvention. It just takes the right scaffolding in the right places.
Start with a shared definition of your buyer and their journey. Not generic personas. Real alignment across Sales, Product, Delivery, and Customer Success about who you are selling to, why they are buying, and what success actually looks like once they are live.
Build intentional handoffs. Every transition point should be clear, whether it is a signed contract, an onboarding kickoff, or a product launch. Each one needs defined owners, clear inputs, and no last-minute surprises.
When feedback depends on who remembers to ask or who is in the room, the system fails. It needs to move automatically, not through side conversations, but through the structure itself. Sales should know what actually sticks. Customer Success should flag what is not working. Product should hear what matters. That information should not rely on memory or good intentions. It should be built into how the company runs.
And tie it all together with a real operating rhythm. Not meetings for the sake of it. Just simple, consistent habits that keep teams aligned and problems visible before they spiral.
None of this sticks unless someone is responsible for how the system actually runs. In some companies, that is a Chief Operating Officer. In others, it is a founder, a Revenue Operations lead, or a sharp generalist with cross-functional trust. The title does not matter. What matters is that someone wakes up every day thinking about how this thing works end to end. That is what creates consistency and allows speed to scale.
Final Thought
Most companies do not stall because the team is unmotivated. They stall because critical work happens in silos, without the structure to connect it. What should be shared context gets lost in handoffs. What should be repeatable gets rebuilt from scratch. And what should be forward motion starts to feel like drag.
The fix is not complicated. Define what success looks like across the journey. Make ownership clear. Build habits that keep information moving across roles, not just up the chain. Put someone in charge of the system, not just the function.
When structure is in place, alignment stops being a heroic effort. Teams operate with context, not guesswork. Execution speeds up, not because people try harder, but because the system stops getting in their way.
This is the difference between reacting to growth and being built for it.
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About the Author
Ryan Peterson writes Upward Growth, where he shares practical insights on selling health tech into the payor market. With 15+ years in healthcare growth leadership, he focuses on helping vendors translate their value into traction with health plans.
🟦 Connect with him on LinkedIn.