For a growing technology company, hiring is supposed to create capacity. More engineers mean more products can be built. More salespeople mean more customers can be reached. More managers should make it possible for founders to step away from day-to-day decisions.
But adding people does not automatically create productive capacity. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index found that 53% of leaders say productivity needs to increase, while 80% of employees and leaders say they already lack enough time or energy to do their work. The problem is increasingly one of coordination, too: Atlassian's research among 5,000 knowledge workers found that 64% feel their teams are constantly being pulled in too many directions.
Somewhere between a small team and a larger organization, an uncomfortable contradiction can therefore emerge: the company has more people capable of making decisions, but decisions start taking longer.
For Stanislav Andrieiev, COO of Ukrainian tech company SharksCode, this is one of the signals leaders should pay attention to when scaling.
SharksCode builds high-load digital products and scalable B2B platforms designed for growth, reliability, and complex business environments. From Stanislav's perspective, however, scalability is not only something companies need to engineer into their software. They also need to build it into the way their teams operate.
"A company scaling from twenty people to eighty grows in every direction at once, and the path a decision walks before someone can act on it grows with it. The teams that stay fast are the ones that sit down and redesign that path on purpose, while the growth is still exciting rather than heavy," Stanislav Andrieiev says.
The challenge is easy to underestimate because growth itself can initially hide it. When processes are unclear, committed employees can end up compensating for them, a pattern Stanislav has observed as teams grow. Managers jump into more conversations, experienced team members answer more questions, and founders continue making decisions they were making when the company was half the size.
Work continues to get done. But the human effort required to keep the system running increases.
Growth adds people, and also connections
The shift Stanislav describes is partly a consequence of mathematics. As companies grow, they do not simply add employees. They add potential relationships between employees, teams, projects, clients, and managers.
The complexity becomes particularly visible in B2B technology, where building a product can involve engineers, designers, product managers, commercial teams, and customers with their own technical requirements.
A decision that previously involved two people can suddenly affect four teams. The instinctive response is often coordination: invite everyone who might be affected and talk it through. Stanislav believes this is where leaders should start watching what their meetings actually produce.
"The best teams I've seen treat a meeting as the place a decision gets finished, not the place it goes to wait. The moment you protect that distinction, the calendar takes care of itself."
There is data behind that concern. Atlassian surveyed 5,000 knowledge workers and found that 77% frequently attend meetings that end with another follow-up meeting, while 54% frequently leave without a clear understanding of the next steps or who owns them.
For Stanislav, however, cutting meetings is not necessarily the solution. Too many meetings can instead reveal something more structural: the organization has not made it clear enough who is allowed to decide.
The real bottleneck might be authority
Stanislav's approach starts by looking at the relationship between information and authority. As companies become larger, the two can drift apart.
An engineer may understand a technical trade-off better than anyone else in the organization, but the formal authority to approve it might sit with a manager. The engineer explains the problem to a team lead, who takes it to a manager, who potentially brings another department into the conversation. The decision moves upward even though the relevant expertise sits lower in the organizational structure. For Stanislav, the better alternative is to push decision-making authority closer to where the information already exists.
"Real autonomy has edges. You give people a decision and you give them the exact shape of it, and that combination is what lets a company move quickly without anyone feeling lost."
The emphasis on boundaries differentiates his approach from simply telling employees they are "empowered." Autonomy without clarity can produce its own delays. If an employee does not know where their authority ends, asking a manager is the rational response. If the manager is unsure whether they can approve something, they escalate it again. The result is an organization where everybody is technically empowered but everybody still asks permission.
Stanislav instead argues for defining recurring decisions more explicitly: who owns them, how far their authority extends, and under what circumstances the issue needs to move higher.
Decision-making has a measurable cost
This can affect more than just meeting schedules. McKinsey research involving more than 1,200 business leaders found that 54% of respondents spent more than 30% of their working time making decisions. Yet 61% said at least half of the time devoted to decision-making was ineffective. Fewer than half said their organizations made decisions in a timely way.
For a typical Fortune 500 company, McKinsey estimated that ineffective decision-making could translate into around 530,000 days of managers' time annually, equivalent to roughly $250M in wages. The scale is different for a growing technology company, but the underlying problem is recognizable: adding more people to a poorly designed decision system can multiply coordination rather than capacity.
This is where Stanislav Andrieiev sees the manager's role changing. One test is surprisingly simple: what does a manager actually add when a decision reaches them?
If managers bring additional context, help resolve competing priorities, or assess risks beyond one team, their involvement can add value. But when their role is mainly to confirm a recommendation already made by the person closest to the work, it may be worth considering whether that additional approval step is necessary.
Can the company operate without everything moving upward?
There is a broader lesson here for technology businesses approaching their next phase of growth. Companies tend to measure scaling through visible numbers: headcount, revenue, customers, funding, markets entered.
Stanislav's argument suggests another metric worth watching: how many decisions can the organization make well without involving senior leadership?
If headcount doubles but increasingly routine questions move upward, the company has expanded without necessarily becoming more scalable.
When expertise, responsibility, and decision-making authority develop in parallel, organizations can operate more efficiently. Managers can focus on decisions that genuinely require their input, meetings can be reserved for more complex issues, and specialists have greater scope to apply their expertise directly. For SharksCode's COO, that is ultimately what organizational scalability looks like.
Technology companies spend enormous amounts of time designing systems that can handle greater demand without collapsing under their own complexity. As Stanislav Andrieiev sees it, the organizations behind those systems deserve the same engineering mindset.