But does it scale?
A few years back, I managed a leader who was an excellent student. She read the management books and attended the development conferences. If there was a process, she followed it. If you asked AI to generate a "diligent executive" persona, it would look like her.
Like a lot of leaders who are good students, she enjoyed applying her knowledge. She used standard rubrics to measure performance. Her team meetings had structured agendas. And by far, her favorite question to ask was, "Does it scale?"
Unfortunately, in our environment, this was usually the wrong question.
Scale is a killer
Hot take: There may be no question that undermines new product development more than, “Does it scale?”
Don’t get me wrong. If you have product-market fit, a predictable sales motion with a predictable win rate, and low churn, then you are ready to scale. But most teams try to scale before they are ready.
For instance, it’s common for early-stage companies to hire outside GTM leaders to run standard sales playbooks. However, the growth signals from 180 different startups show that founder-led sales far outperform VP-Sales-led sales at least until products pass their first $1M in ARR. You can't successfully scale a selling motion if you haven't figured out the motion in the first place.
Another common mistake: trying to ramp demand generation before the sale has been proven. At best, this becomes a distracting waste of time. At worst, it is a distracting waste of time and burns through valuable capital. Don't waste time attracting leads if your product or service isn't ready for them.
Diligent executives do this a lot, though, because it feels incredibly validating to operate at scale. Even if you're not ready.
The act of scaling gaslights you into thinking your product is good
If your business is already operating at scale and you're launching a new product, it's especially tempting to ask, "Does it scale?" too soon. After all, you already have customers and revenue flowing, and you've built the operational systems to support a thriving and scaling business. It feels grown-up and mature to launch new products within those systems. Like because you have the systems in place to scale, you feel market-ready even if your product is not.
Mature companies are at greater risk of being gaslit by scale than startups, because they've often forgotten what it looks like to operate in a true 0 to 1 environment. In a mature company, a product doesn't feel ready if it isn't feature-complete and if the entire revenue team doesn't know how to sell and market it. A new process doesn't feel viable if it isn't rolled out to the entire organization. But none of these things are required to go from 0 to 1, and scaling before you're ready makes you feel like you have product-market fit when you don't.
AI is the ultimate scale gaslighter
Scaling too soon will kill any kind of business, but it's especially fraught if your business is AI. There are obvious economic reasons for this: it's easy to torpedo your unit economics paying for AI tokens if your product isn't meeting a real customer need. This alone is reason to be cautious.
But AI companies have other risks besides immediate costs. Early adopters of any product often behave differently from real customers at scale. If you scale an AI product before you actually understand how customers use your product, you lock in the wrong data. You end up training, fine-tuning, or optimizing for edge-case behavior.
Once you've locked the wrong patterns into your systems, they quietly distort everything that follows, from model behavior to roadmap decisions. AI products are probabilistic systems. When you scale too early, you expose half-formed failure modes to a much wider audience. Hallucinations, brittleness, and bias stop being early product issues and start becoming just how your product works. In AI, trust compounds slowly and breaks fast.
The bottom line: if you're not ready to scale (and most early products aren't), there is nothing you can do to destroy your chances of success than scaling too soon.
Kieran
Whether you're going from 0 to 1 or already at scale, here are my favorite three activities for high-performing and connected teams. And if you liked this story, why not subscribe to nerd processor and get the back issues?
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