The great growth debate

Posted by Danvers Baillieu on January 30, 2023

Before being co-founders at ApprovalDeck, Riki and I were colleagues at another tech company, which we saw grow from 10 staff (when I joined) to 20 (when Riki joined), to around 140 people, with most of this growth happening in the two years between mid-2020 and mid-2022. We’d both been through growth journeys at other tech start ups and knew that we needed to be ready for the organised chaos that would inevitably ensue when we started to hit our goals.

But just because we both agreed on what the end goal would look like, it did not mean we always saw eye-to-eye on how we would get there. Implement a process too soon the danger is that it both eats up valuable time and energy but, more importantly, it can set a decision in stone that quickly turns out to be wrong, depriving an early stage business of much needed flexibility. The chaos of late implementation is manifested in basic tasks being overlooked, wheels being constantly reinvented and inconsistent decisions.

Fortunately, Riki and I were able to recognise when our disagreement over a new process was a matter of timing rather than a fundamental rejection of the other’s approach, and were therefore able to question our own biases. We understood the framework within which we both operated and this allowed us to make better decisions, without wasting time on questioning underlying assumptions (e.g. the assumption that we were part of a growing business).

One of our ambitions for ApprovalDeck is to help our customers think about the frameworks they use for making decisions, so these can be articulated, shared and embedded within their organisations. We believe this will allow organisations to make better decisions, faster.