Early and late-stage hypergrowth.

Last week, a colleague asked why I’d hired an additional new leader onto an important area rather than expanding an existing leader’s scope to incorporate that area as well. The existing leader was a known quantity and doing well, so why not keep expanding them? It’s a good question, and depending on the circumstances I might have done either, but explaining why I specifically brought in a new leader this time depends a bit on a distinction I think of as early versus late-stage hypergrowth. In Cross the Chasm’s world, early-stage is when you’ve proven product market fit, have won the early adopters, and are just starting to win the early majority. In this phase, there are specific problems, and the most important problem is to solve those specific problems. For example, you might be having scalability issues, and solving that is the company’s almost sole focus for a few weeks. After scalability is fixed, next you’ll need to work on onboarding flows to convert for less technical users,…