Agility - The Edge Startups Have

Earlier this year, I was part of a project for a Fortune 500 enterprise where we built a page for their website. The ask was very simple, build a page where customers can view various documents. I remember looking at the mockups when we kicked off the project and thinking to myself “this will take a month tops” but boy was I wrong. In the end it ended up taking us almost 6 months to build this one page and the reason it took so long had almost nothing to do with the actual technology.

This place was very bureaucratic and it showed. I could talk for ages about the problems there but one interaction really encapsulated how bad it was. Our feature needed a feature flag to run behind and of course we needed to go through another team to get it. The team indicated to us that they had setup the flag so I reached out and asked them for it. They engineer that I worked with told me that even though he was looking at the flag name on his screen, he could not communicate that name to me through “non-official” channels. It ended up taking us another 4 weeks of back and forth and creating numerous tickets for the engineer to finally send us a Slack message telling us the name of the flag. This org was particularly bad but the inefficiency was something I’ve seen first hand working with many different enterprise orgs.

Though it may just seem like a fact of life working at big organizations, it’s also an enormous edge that startups and smaller organizations have over their much larger counterparts. On the surface it may seem that larger organizations can just run circles around smaller ones because of their increased headcount but you must take into consideration the diminishing returns they get from increasing their headcount.

Every time you add another person to an organization, there is increased “friction” that marginally lowers everyone’s productivity. At the smallest scale you can see this in startups where once you have more than 2-3 engineers, you start needed the overhead of things like payroll, HR, and other business units not directly tied to building your product. Now at first you will see productivity gains because you have more people working on a project but those gains slowly get smaller and smaller as the headcount goes up. Though every organization will be different, you can easily make the case that an org with a headcount of 5,000 would only be marginally less productive if they dropped their headcount to 1,000.

If you run a startup then this should give you confidence to go up against the big guys. Remember while you are busy hammering out features and delivering to your customers, your (much larger) competitors are probably going back and forth about “proper channels of communication” or some other nonsense caused by their massive size.