Legora has successfully scaled its product organization by hiring former YC founders to lead autonomous 'pods.' This strategy leverages the fact that founders excel in environments with high ownership and delegated responsibility, allowing them to operate their product area like a mini-startup and maintain development velocity.
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The most effective hires are individuals with the entrepreneurial drive to build their own business but who recognize greater potential in leveraging your company's platform and distribution. This strategy attracts talent that thinks like owners, not employees, and can run their departments autonomously.
The traditional, linear handoff from product (PRDs) to design to dev is too slow for AI's rapid iteration cycles. Leading companies merge these roles into smaller, senior teams where design and product deliver functional prototypes directly to engineering, collapsing the feedback loop and accelerating development.
Large companies like Rippling and TripActions maintain innovation velocity by creating "carved out" teams for new, "zero to one" initiatives. This organizational strategy provides singular focus, empowering a small group to execute with the intensity and speed of an early-stage startup without corporate distractions.
Instead of a single centralized growth team, ElevenLabs creates dedicated "sharded" growth teams for each product line (e.g., consumer app, creator tools). These pods act as mini-CMOs for their product, supported by a horizontal team of channel specialists like SEO and performance marketing leads.
A scaling founder can avoid "breaking the model" during hypergrowth by hiring senior leaders with proven track records in similar environments. For example, Profound hired a CRO who previously scaled a company with the same target customer to $250M, bringing invaluable experience to manage chaos.
PostHog manages its 16+ product suite by assigning small, autonomous teams of roughly three engineers to each product. This "compound startup" approach allows them to go wide, competing with multiple point solutions while remaining flat and avoiding bureaucracy. The small team structure fosters ownership and rapid development.
Palo Alto Networks' founder advises that when facing a 10x leap in scale, founders who haven't navigated that stage should hire leaders who have. Rather than being a hero and learning on the job, it's safer and more effective to bring in proven experience to de-risk the next phase of growth.
To scale a high-performing product team, hire individuals who exhibit the same level of ownership and love for the product as the original founders. This means prioritizing a blend of deep curiosity, leadership potential, and an unwavering commitment to execution over a simple skills checklist.
Scaling a company isn't linear. Founders first achieve Product-Market Fit. The next stage is "Company-Market Fit," building organizational structures for growth. Crucially, they must then cycle back to reinventing the product to stay ahead, rather than just managing the machine they built.
To avoid bureaucratic bloat, organize the company into small, self-sufficient "pods" of no more than 10 people. Each pod owns a specific problem and includes all necessary roles. Performance is judged solely on the pod's impact, mimicking an early-stage startup's focus.
