Most org structure problems do not announce themselves. They show up as friction: a decision that takes longer than it should, a meeting that keeps happening without resolution, a person who is doing work that does not match their title. By the time the problem is visible in performance numbers, it has usually been building for six to twelve months.
The founder is still doing IC work at 30 people ¶
This is the most common pattern we see. The founder built the company by doing things directly, and the habits of doing things directly are hard to break even when the organisation has grown past the point where that is useful. The tell is usually a team that is waiting for decisions that the founder has not made yet, or a product that reflects the founder's taste rather than the team's collective judgment. The fix is not a mindset shift, it is a structural one: clear decision rights, documented and communicated.
Two people are both 'in charge' of the same thing ¶
This happens most often with co-founders who split responsibilities informally in the early days and never revisited the split as the company grew. It also happens when a company promotes someone internally and then hires externally for a similar role without being clear about who owns what. The symptom is a team that routes the same questions to two different people and gets different answers. The cost is not just inefficiency, it is the erosion of trust in leadership.
Meetings keep happening without resolution ¶
A recurring meeting that never produces a decision is usually a sign that the decision-making authority in the room is unclear. Either the person who can make the call is not in the room, or the person in the room does not feel empowered to make it. Before adding another meeting to the calendar, it is worth asking: who is supposed to decide this, and do they know that?
A role exists because of a person, not a need ¶
This happens when a valued employee asks for a promotion and the company creates a title to retain them without thinking clearly about what the role is for. The person is happy, but the organisation now has a function that was not designed, reporting lines that do not make sense, and a precedent that is hard to walk back. The fix is usually a conversation that should have happened before the promotion.
New hires take longer than expected to become useful ¶
A long ramp time for new hires is often a sign that the organisation's knowledge is not written down anywhere. The new person has to learn by asking, and the people they ask are busy. This is a documentation problem, but it is also a structure problem: if the organisation cannot onboard people efficiently, it cannot scale. The org design field notes guide covers this pattern in detail.
None of these patterns are permanent. They are predictable, and they are fixable if they are named early enough. If two or three of these sound familiar, it is worth taking an hour to map the decision rights in your organisation before the next hire.