Building the Operational Foundation for Growth

The Situation

When Erika joined the company, it was a small, founder-led technology business with approximately 50 customers and a handful of employees.

Much of the administrative work was still paper-based. There was no formal management structure beyond the founder, and functions such as Customer Success, Partnerships, and People Operations had yet to be established.

As the company grew, its needs became more complex. New employees, departments, and managers brought greater specialization, but also created challenges in communication, coordination, and accountability.

Information wasn't always shared between teams. Responsibilities and processes needed to evolve, and issues frequently escalated to executive leadership rather than being resolved across departments.

The business needed more than additional people. It needed the operational structure and coordination to support its growth.

The Approach

Erika's work evolved alongside the company.

What began with establishing administrative systems expanded into building and leading customer-facing functions, managing partnerships, supporting employees and managers, and strengthening coordination across the organization.

Working across these areas gave her visibility into how decisions, processes, and experiences in one part of the business affected the others.

Rather than treating departmental challenges as isolated problems, she focused on understanding the connections between them and developing practical solutions that improved how the organization worked.

The Work

Connecting Department Leaders and Reducing Executive Bottlenecks

As the company expanded, department managers took on greater responsibility, but many decisions, challenges, and frustrations continued flowing back to executive leadership.

The managers were responsible for their individual functions, yet there was limited structure for working through issues together.

Erika established and led biweekly cross-functional management meetings, creating a consistent opportunity for leaders to share priorities, customer feedback, challenges, and areas where they needed support.

These conversations helped managers better understand how their departments affected one another, identify opportunities for collaboration, and resolve issues without relying on executive intervention.

Over time, the meetings strengthened working relationships, improved coordination, and encouraged greater ownership and independence among managers.

Improving the Sales-to-Implementation Handoff

The implementation team regularly needed information that hadn't been collected during the sales process.

As a result, new customers were asked to repeat information, employees spent additional time following up, and onboarding could be delayed.

Erika worked with the teams to identify the information Implementation needed upfront.

She developed a structured questionnaire and partnered with Sales leadership to incorporate those questions earlier in the customer journey.

This created a more consistent handoff, reduced unnecessary back-and-forth, and helped the implementation process move more efficiently.

Giving Support Better Visibility Into Development

Support employees often needed updates from Development before they could answer customer questions about bugs, feature requests, or ongoing technical issues.

Without direct visibility, customer responses depended on someone in Development being available to provide an update.

Erika identified an opportunity to improve access to information without adding more work for either department.

She configured Azure DevOps dashboards and helped Support employees learn how to use them to track relevant development activity.

This gave Support greater independence, helped employees provide more timely customer updates, and reduced unnecessary interruptions to Development.

Building the Infrastructure Behind the Customer and Employee Experience

Beyond these individual improvements, Erika helped establish and strengthen functions and practices that supported the growing organization.

Her responsibilities included developing Customer Success capabilities, coordinating customer onboarding and implementations, managing vendor partnerships, supporting people operations, improving administrative systems, and facilitating communication across teams.

This work helped create more consistency in how the business served customers, supported employees, and coordinated day-to-day operations.

The Impact

During Erika's seven-year tenure, the company grew from approximately 50 to 2,000 customers and from a small founding team to approximately 65 employees.

While that growth was a company-wide achievement, her work contributed to the operational foundation needed to support an increasingly complex business.

Improvements included:

• Stronger cross-functional collaboration: Department leaders gained a consistent forum for sharing information, resolving issues, and coordinating priorities.

• Greater management independence: Managers became better equipped to make decisions and address challenges without unnecessary executive escalation.

• More efficient customer onboarding: Clearer handoffs reduced repeated questions, additional follow-up, and avoidable delays.

• More responsive customer support: Better visibility into Development helped Support provide timely updates.

• Stronger internal infrastructure: Established processes, customer-facing functions, and employee support practices helped the organization operate more consistently as it expanded.

The result was a more coordinated organization with stronger systems, clearer communication, and greater capacity to support employees and customers through growth.

The Bigger Picture

Growth changes what a business needs from its people, processes, and leadership.

What works with a handful of employees doesn't necessarily work with dozens. And hiring managers doesn't automatically mean those managers will work together.

Building a stronger organization requires understanding how its different parts affect one another—and creating the structure that allows people to succeed together.