I heard a great metaphor for building companies the other day.

When you start a company, you're scrambling, trying to find your way, and building lots of new things. You find that when things work, the company is held together with duct tape. A large part of the job in making it into a great company is turning that duct tape into steel so that it can sustain itself without requiring superhero levels of daily effort. It's worth stepping back to understand this metaphor and how the priorities of an organization change over time.

The Duct Tape Days

The "duct tape" days are tough. You have to tackle a bunch of new and challenging things: raise money, convince great people to join you, figure out how to build something new, find product/market fit, implement it, and make customers happy—along with dozens of other little things you need to do to get a company off the ground.

The hardest part of this phase is that you're breaking ground on something new. All along the way, you know in the back of your mind that it might not actually work. This is stressful and hard to manage. However, the best part of this phase is the high level of alignment with your team. You probably don't have many customers (if any), you don't have a lot of employees, and everyone is mostly rowing in the same direction. The highest priority for any given employee at this stage is the same (or very close to the same) as the highest priority for the company. That's a great thing.

When you get past this initial phase and find that you have something that works and that people want, you quickly start to encounter a new set of problems. Your problems shift from building something new to scaling it. And the better the company performs, the more problems you will have. If you talk to people at startups, most (actually, all) will tell you it's a sh*t show. The faster the growth, the bigger the sh*t show.

The reason is that a company takes on more commitments as it grows—commitments to customers, investors, governments, auditors, partners, vendors, and one another via cross-functional teams. In the early days of scaling, these commitments grow linearly with the company. All of these commitments are new, and the workflows to manage them must be built from scratch. You probably expected some of them, but you'll also discover commitments you never imagined at the outset due to the compounding complexity that comes with scale.

Scaling Up

To manage these commitments effectively, the company will soon start to split into teams and add managers, new job titles, and levels. This structure becomes necessary because specialized groups can more effectively focus on specific areas, make faster decisions, enhance accountability, communicate more efficiently, and take ownership of the new workflows built around the growing set of commitments.

Pretty soon, you have a structure and a long list of commitments and priorities that looks something like this:

Finance: Budget management, financial reporting, cash flow management, compliance and audits
Sales: Revenue targets, customer acquisition, CRM management, territory or account management
Operations: Customer onboarding, process optimization, logistics and fulfillment, vendor management
Product: Product roadmap, feature development, quality assurance, user feedback integration
Marketing: Brand management, lead generation, content creation, market research
HR: Talent acquisition, employee onboarding, performance management, employee development

That's a lot of duct tape.

Quickly, the distance between the highest priority for any individual employee starts to diverge from the highest priority for the company, and that distance only continues to grow over time. You start to have lots of competing priorities and people rowing in different directions.

Competing priorities naturally lead to confusion and miscommunication among team members, resulting in unclear roles and conflicting work. This misalignment often causes inefficiencies and duplication of efforts, as teams may unknowingly work on similar tasks independently. Frustration can build, decreasing morale and motivation among employees who feel their efforts are not well aligned with company goals. Decisions get delayed, and things might feel like they’re standing still, leading to missed opportunities and slowed progress.

Tech people like to lovingly refer to this as "thrash."

Ultimately, this thrash can lead to poor performance and poor culture.

Turning Duct Tape Into Steel

Companies need to get ahead of all of this natural and inherent side effect of growth. They need to start turning the duct tape into steel by putting goals, processes, metrics, and communication systems in place to ensure a high-performance standard against all of these new commitments. They also need to align the work being done with the company’s strategy and financial objectives. Tools like vision and mission statements, OKRs, company values, cultural principles, financial targets, team offsites, company-wide meetings, cross-functional meetings, accountability and reporting systems, and management processes need to be implemented to solidify strong systems and prioritization around the company’s commitments.

There are multiple frameworks and playbooks on how to do this well. However, every company is different, and each should publish and regularly communicate its systems to their teams. Doing this well can become an enormous competitive advantage over time. I’ll write more over time about some of the things I’ve seen work well.

The Cadence

One of the most common and dangerous areas of misalignment in this phase—particularly for b2b companies—is between product, marketing, and sales. In consumer-focused companies, a natural glue pulls these teams together. Often, there’s no sales team, and large parts of marketing are embedded within the product (algorithm-based merchandising, social sharing features, cart abandonment targeting, etc.). This glue doesn’t exist or is far less sticky inside a b2b company. In b2b, these teams are often separated under different leaders but are the commercial lifeblood of the company. The product team builds things that create TAM, the marketing team builds a pipeline out of that TAM, and the sales team closes that pipeline pipeline. Without tight alignment between these three teams, things can quickly fall apart.

To help manage this, one framework I love and highly recommend borrowing and wanted to highlight today is "The Cadence: How to Operate a SaaS Startup" as described by David Sacks in his somewhat dated but enormously valuable Medium post.

In it, Sacks recommends putting sales and finance on a shared cadence and calendar and product and marketing on another shared cadence and calendar.

From the post on the sales and finance cadence:

"Every company runs on a fiscal year as an accounting requirement. This finance calendar should be synchronized with the sales calendar for reporting reasons. When the books close on a fiscal quarter, the numbers should reflect a complete quarter’s sales activity, not an incomplete mid-quarter picture. The leadership and board will have a much better sense of what’s happening in the business if sales plans are snapped to fiscal quarters."

And on the marketing and product cadence:

"When rapidly scaling startups don’t have effective product management, one of two things happens. First, they just ship sand. They polish and fix bugs and usability issues, but they don’t ship tentpole features, new products, and major releases. Or when they do, they end up going wildly over schedule. A product that was supposed to take one quarter will still be in development multiple quarters later. ‘V2s’ that were supposed to take a couple of quarters end up being years late and paralyze the company. This happens because the product was never scoped correctly. The quarterly discipline ensures that you do big stuff—rocks, not just sand—while scoping correctly."

"None of this is to say that code can’t be shipped weekly or even daily for code management reasons, but PM planning should revolve around quarterly or seasonal releases. Now that you know there will be a major quarterly product release, you can plan marketing around that. This is why marketing and product are on the same calendar. Startups are product-driven, and most news that the company puts out will feed off of new product releases."

While I’m a huge fan of this approach, the brilliance isn’t necessarily in the details but in two very important concepts:

The notion of internal teams making solid commitments to one another and
Tying that commitment to a calendar and firm timeline.

Getting teams to hold one another accountable and rely on each other with specific timelines is a giant step in turning duct tape into steel.

That said, I’ve historically found that product teams can sometimes be reluctant to commit to firm timelines, as they’re described in this framework. Product development processes from companies like Google or Spotify often prioritize agility and rapid iteration to respond to changing user preferences and market trends. This can cause them to favor less rigid timelines, which makes a shared calendar with the marketing team challenging to operationalize.

Conversely, companies like Oracle or SAP, which deal with large customer expectations, integration requirements, buying cycles, budget cycles, and program cycles, require fixed timelines and have more structured environments. You can almost view Google and Oracle as two sides of a spectrum.

The right approach to this spectrum isn’t to be philosophical (e.g., is Google better than Oracle?) but should be based on the unique characteristics and attributes of the buyer and the way the product is bought, sold, and implemented. Before adopting this approach, I’d encourage all commercially focused teams to dive deep on this point.

Ultimately, every company is built on a foundation of duct tape in the beginning—it’s messy, thrashy, and fragile, and it feels like it could fall apart at any moment. It’s important to understand how and why this happens so you can get ahead of its pitfalls. The companies that succeed are the ones that learn to replace duct tape with steel methodically and with intention. Time-based, cross-functional accountability is an incredibly valuable tool and tactic to manage through this crucial transition.