Knowing when and how to scale your software team can be complicated. Putting in place the proper tools with a long-term outlook can lead to colossal growth. Still, there is no one way to scale a team or company. Understanding what is already working and unique about your business will provide clues for how to best adapt as you scale up operations. In this article Jesse Heikkilä discusses when and how you should scale your software development team.

Whether a bootstrapped startup or a corporate behemoth, starting a new business has always been a hit-and-miss endeavor. According to the decades-long formula, you design a business strategy, offer it to investors, assemble a team, launch a product, and begin selling aggressively. And somewhere along the way, you'll almost certainly experience a deadly setback. According to research, the chances are stacked against you; a whopping 90% of all start-ups fail.‍However, to mitigate the odds that are definitely against new founders and certainly not for the faint of heart, we should consider a new way of doing things by emphasizing experimentation and iterative design over traditional "big design up front" development, and customer input over intuition or old rigid models. ‍Where companies often tumble is their deep misunderstanding of the product/market fit. 

A well-defined product development strategy is undoubtedly the secret to building a successful company. Whether developing a new product or revamping an existing one, a clear vision, goals, and initiatives make all the difference. A clear roadmap that accounts for the rightful resources and an apt timeline are a must. Once the high level roadmap is clear, you have all the flexibility in the world to add features or other tweaks along the way. Building a killer product strategy doesn't have to be complicated, but it should be time-consuming, as a good strategy is the antidote to chaos in a sea of unpredictability. Now, let's look at some of the key elements needed for a winning product strategy.

Energizing an enterprise-scale company with innovation isn't easy. Cash-hungry startups fuel themselves on lean operating models and growth-generating funnels like AARRR, Lean Canvas, and the Lean Startup Model. But established businesses don't have the luxury of hyper-focusing on rapid, all-or-nothing growth. They have a core business model to protect and old rigid patterns to emulate. How do you break out, develop that amazing new product or service, and tread gracefully over the all-too-common scaling frictions that sink most ventures? You need to infect your venture with the same entrepreneurial spirit it had back when it successfully scaled into the sunset and built a terrific and consistent core.

Corporate venturing is about entrepreneurial activities that require a mindset of innovation. This is where corporate entrepreneurship comes into play.

What is product/market fit, and how to find it? This article discusses what product/market fit (PMF) is in practice. To understand how we can achieve it, we get to know an early learning process called Product/Market Fit Discovery.

It’s rather unfortunate that most of the best actionable content for digital innovation is often written solely from the angle of startups, where you’re building upon a clean table. The reality, after all, is that >90% of the world’s current value is tied to legacy systems and organizations, as well as existing management practices— and with good reason: Old strategies and systems have been trialed and tested by time, and they’ve simply been proven to work.

Product management always exists when building or growing a new product business. We need to decide on what to build, ergo you have product management. So it's not really a question of whether you have product management, but on what level your product management is, and whether it creates real value for our company.