What it means in practice
A technology company scaling quickly often adds functional boundaries at a pace that outstrips its ability to clarify decision rights across them. Product, engineering, sales, and customer success frequently start as a single, tightly coordinated group and become four or five distinct functions within a short period, each with its own priorities and its own read on what the company should do next. A decision about a feature’s priority might depend on product’s read of customer need, engineering’s read of technical feasibility, and sales’ read of what is currently blocking deals — three legitimate perspectives, no formal mechanism for resolving disagreement between them, and a growing tendency for the decision to simply stall at the boundary where the three perspectives meet.
Why it happens
Rogers and Blenko’s research suggests these bottlenecks are rarely about any individual’s poor judgement; they emerge because the information relevant to a decision and the formal authority to make it are not always held by the same person. A product manager closest to customer feedback may have the clearest read on what matters, while budget or roadmap authority sits with a more senior leader several steps removed from that direct signal. Early-stage companies rarely need to resolve this explicitly, because a small enough team can simply talk it through in real time. As functions multiply and physical or organisational distance between people grows, that informal resolution stops being reliable, and the company needs some deliberate way of making clear where a given category of decision actually belongs.
This connects to Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull’s finding that cross-unit coordination, not the quality of planning, is the central barrier to execution in growing organisations — a pattern their research found held across more than 250 companies regardless of industry. A recognisable version plays out whenever a technology company launches a feature that requires product, engineering and sales to move in step: each function may individually execute its own piece competently, yet the overall launch still stalls or underperforms because no boundary-spanning mechanism existed to keep the three moving on a shared, current understanding of priority and timeline. The failure is rarely attributable to any single function; it is the coordination between them, invisible in any one team’s own metrics, that breaks down.
Where this varies
The pattern shows up differently depending on how a company has structured itself. Companies organised around strong, autonomous product teams tend to see bottlenecks concentrate at the boundary between product-level speed and centralised functions like platform engineering or security, where local teams want quick answers and central teams want consistency across the whole system. More centrally coordinated companies tend to see the reverse: individual product teams feeling that decisions relevant to their specific area move too slowly because they route through a central process not built with their particular context in mind.
A related complication is that decision bottlenecks in a fast-growing company tend to move rather than settle in one place. A boundary that caused friction six months ago may have been resolved through a reorganisation, only for a new boundary to open up as the company adds its next function or product line — meaning the specific fix that worked once rarely stays effective for long, and periodic review of where friction currently sits tends to matter more than any single structural change.
Funding stage adds a further, less obvious dimension. A company operating under tighter capital constraints often has fewer layers between the people closest to customer signal and the people with budget authority, simply because there are fewer layers overall — which can mask the underlying decision-rights problem until later growth adds the layers that make it visible. A well-capitalised company scaling headcount quickly can encounter the same bottleneck pattern much earlier in its life, precisely because it has the resources to add organisational layers faster than a more constrained peer.
Where this shows up
The pattern described here is most recognisable in technology companies, part of the wider Professional and Knowledge-Based grouping. The same organisational questions appear, under different names, in other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- Where in this company do decisions most often stall, and who actually holds the information most relevant to making them well?
- As the company has added functions, has anyone reviewed whether decision authority still sits where the relevant knowledge sits?
- Is inconsistency in how similar decisions get made across different teams a discipline problem, or a sign that decision rights were never made explicit?
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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