1 | A company's operating system: what lets you scale without falling apart

Thomas Vonwil

11 Jan 2026 • 6 min read

Who this post is for: Leaders whose organization has grown past the point where coordination took care of itself, and who sense things slowing down without an obvious cause.

TL;DR:

When companies grow, they tend to slow down: decisions take longer, priorities blur, people start saying "them" instead of "us"
The cause is typically not a bad hire or an underperforming team, but that the organization has outgrown its informal operating system
Every company has an operating system, by design or by accident: it determines how a company converts its aspiration into results
It is made up of six elements: people, strategy, priorities, structure, processes & initiatives, and information technology
A coherent operating system, where individual elements reinforce each other, makes an organization far more effective and enjoyable to work in

When companies scale, founders and builders often share a similar frustration: teams grow, but not much more gets done.

What used to be simple and fast starts to slow down. More and more time goes into reactive firefighting. Decisions take longer. Priorities blur. The same issues keep coming up without ever being settled. And people start using "them" instead of "us" when talking about (other parts of) the company.

When this happens, people typically start looking for a cause: a hire that did not work out, a team that is dropping the ball, a market that got tougher. Sometimes that is it. But often, none of these fully explain the issue, because the cause is not in any single place. It is that the company outgrew the way it used to work: its largely informal operating system.

Why your operating system starts to matter

Every company has an operating system, either by design or by accident. It determines how work gets done: how people coordinate, make decisions, and turn effort into results. Many companies do not shape theirs deliberately. It just emerges, through habits, personalities, and local optimizations.

Early on, this is fine. In small teams, everyone knows each other, often sits close, and roughly knows what is going on. Coordination happens on its own, and you can get away without thinking much about the operating system at all.

But this does not scale. Somewhere beyond a few dozen people, this informal version quietly stops working: priorities and narratives diverge, ownership blurs, and what used to be obvious now has to be made explicit. The tricky part is that this shift is gradual. There is no single day where everything breaks, so it is easy to postpone this work until you are well past the right starting point.

And the cost compounds. Like technical debt, organizational debt makes everything built on top of it harder and more expensive. The longer you leave it unaddressed, the more of your future capacity goes to keeping up with problems rather than building what comes next. In my view, few issues derail a growing organization more reliably than a weak operating system.

I believe that if leadership teams treated the operating system with the same discipline that Finance applies to the P&L or Sales to the funnel, companies would run far more effectively. People would also enjoy working in them much more.

How to build a strong operating system (and keep it strong as your company grows) is the core of this blog.

What a company's operating system is

First, what a company's operating system is not: it is not software. This is not about your ERP or CRM. It is also not just about your org chart.

A company's operating system is what converts its aspiration into results: the set of elements that determine whether you can actually do what you set out to do.

People use different terms (e.g. management system, operating model) and emphasize different elements (e.g. culture, strategy, structure, processes), but they all share common themes. And while I mostly write about "the company" here, the same principles apply at any level: business units, functions, and teams. That is because a good operating system is fractal. You can start from wherever you are today.

Several models describe how organizations get work done (e.g. McKinsey's 7S or Bain's Operating Model). However, when we looked for a model to apply in practice at u-blox (the Swiss tech company I worked for at the time), none fit our needs well enough as-is. We therefore adapted and combined existing ideas into our own operating system framework. Below you see it in its most condensed form.

A strong operating system enables you to aim high and move fast

These six elements cover what matters to describe and shape how your organization gets work done. The top three help you aim high: the right people, a clear strategic direction, and focus on what matters most. The bottom three help you move fast: clear roles and decision-making, effective processes, and the right data and tools.

Condensed into six boxes, this can look abstract. In practice, each of these is lived (or suffered) every day, in concrete ways anyone in the organization would recognize. How to set each of them up well is what the rest of this blog is about. As a start, here is the summary:

People: The values and behaviors that underpin your culture, and the talent system that determines who you work with. When this is weak, culture becomes whatever the loudest people make it, hiring is inconsistent, and your best performers quietly leave.
Strategy: Your winning aspiration and choices on where you play and how you win with customers. When this is weak, every opportunity looks attractive, teams pull in different directions, and "how we win" gets answered differently depending on who you ask.
Priorities: Your mid-term plans, your most important KPIs and goals, and your capacity allocation. When this is weak, everything feels urgent, capacity is chronically over-committed, and KPIs may (or may not) appear in reports but do not steer work.
Structure: How you organize people, information, and time. When this is weak, ownership blurs, decision-making slows down, and the same issues get re-litigated meeting after meeting.
Processes & initiatives: How you organize both the repeatable work that delivers value today ("run") and the improvement work that builds tomorrow ("change"). When this is weak, repeatable work gets reinvented every time and change initiatives pile up without ever finishing.
Information technology: The data, applications, and infrastructure that underpin your organization. When this is weak, people cannot find what they need, data contradicts itself across tools, and the tech stack slows the organization down instead of helping it move.

Most companies have actively shaped some of these elements, but often not all. Some of the pieces that are shaped work well, others less so. Often, too, the pieces are borrowed from different places: a goal-setting method from one book, a strategy process from a past employer, a hiring approach someone brought along. People rarely check whether the elements fit together. And when they do not, they may end up working against each other.

A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. – Donella Meadows

This is what makes an operating system more than the sum of its parts: much of what it actually does emerges from how the elements interact. The CEO is the only one who would, in theory, have end-to-end ownership of the whole. But with everything else competing for their attention, working on coherence often gets neglected.

Why I care about this

I remember my struggle 10 years ago as a freshly minted COO of a scale-up. We were around 70 people back then and I was living with the constant feeling that things were somehow slipping through our fingers. That we were not really in control. That we were constantly pushed into reactive mode, even for things that should not have come as surprises at all.

As much as I loved this job, I hated that feeling. It stressed me out. It robbed me of sleep. And I knew this issue stopped us from living up to our potential.

I want this to become the blog I wish I had back then: something that provides structure and practical explanations for how to organize a company in the middle of scaling. How to regain control, stay on track, and increase speed. If you are building an organization and want it to scale without descending into chaos or bureaucracy, I hope this blog will be useful to you.

What comes next

This post is the starting point: outlining what a company's operating system is, why every organization already has one, and why it is worth working on deliberately.

In the next post, I look at why scaling organizations develop what Alex Komoroske calls the coordination headwind: why growth so often leads to complexity, slowness, and the loss of start-up mojo. And why deliberately shaping your operating system can make a big difference.

Because scaling is not just about more revenue, customers, or products. It is also about ensuring that the systems underpinning your organization can keep growing with you.

Why your operating system starts to matter

What a company's operating system is

Why I care about this

What comes next

Further reading