Faster-growing teams need more ops staff

A tool to estimate the ops demands of scaling

Let’s consider two organisations. They each have 100 people, but one is in a steady state (0% growth), and the other is growing at 50%.

Under reasonable assumptions, we should expect that the faster-growth org hires 3.0× as many people each year, that there’s more system re-design work, and that the operations staff are twice as likely to be new.

These, and other effects, mean that the faster-growth org needs more operations staff.

80k has been hiring at ~50% per year recently, rather than the ~25% per year of our historical average. I think we’ve really felt these effects, and they’ve been larger than my intuition thought they would be! But I think that if I’d actually stared at some of these models for a while, I might have been able to anticipate them better.

I’ve built a tool to help you build your intuitions around the sizes of the effects operating here. I hope it helps!