Coordination headwind: why scaling companies slow down and what helps

Last updated on 25 Jan 2026

When companies scale, founders and builders often share a similar frustration: teams grow, but not a lot more gets done. What used to be simple and fast starts to slow down. Decisions take longer. Priorities blur, and coordination overhead rises.

Some of this is unavoidable: scale brings complexity and coordination needs. Alex Komoroske calls this the “coordination headwind”, a term I like a lot. He described its dynamics in this slide deck, which I find worth reading (though it is not short). In this post, I summarize his thinking, add my own observations from several growing organizations, and explain how the coordination headwind is tightly linked to a company's operating system.

Why it develops

Nobody creates the coordination headwind on purpose. Even with competent, hard-working people, it emerges naturally as a company scales.

Once a company reaches product-market fit and starts to grow, several things tend to happen in quick succession:

Revenue growth requires hiring more people: not just in Sales, but also in Customer Support, R&D, Operations, Finance, IT, and HR
R&D considers creating several groups as it moves from the v1 MVP (which still needs maintenance and new features) to a cleaner, more scalable v2
Sales pushes for new features and products based on customer feedback
Compliance demands rise: certifications, audits, export rules, customer questionnaires

Within a short time, internal complexity rises sharply, and with it come four dynamics that create the coordination headwind:

Weaker focus: As more topics run in parallel and more people are involved in more initiatives, it becomes harder to know what truly matters. Priorities start to blur, reducing both focus and speed.
Less alignment: Information now travels across several individuals before reaching everyone. Each "person-to-person hop" can distort the message or stop it altogether. Different narratives start to emerge on what the company is actually trying to achieve.
More friction: As headcount rises, the number of connections between people grows exponentially. Each connection can create friction (differing views, trade-offs, personality clashes). Issues that were once resolved in minutes now need coordination across multiple teams and layers. To avoid escalation, people stop raising issues – until they become too big to ignore and hard to fix.
Reduced capacity: As the company grows, its most experienced people spend less time creating and more time enabling others (interviewing, onboarding, reviewing). Headcount increases, but output per person falls.

These issues grow quietly but have a large effect: small inefficiencies multiply quickly, strengthening the coordination headwind surprisingly fast.

"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going." – Irwin Corey

What it does

Left unchecked, this headwind can seriously damage a company's performance and team morale. As Alex Komoroske describes, there is a rough template of how this typically unfolds.

At first, people react to stronger headwinds by working harder, trying to will their way through rising organizational dysfunction. But as coordination becomes harder, they realize that it is faster to just go ahead on their own. This creates even more puzzle pieces that do not fit together, further increasing coordination costs. A self-reinforcing negative spiral of local optimization.

Going it alone may work for some teams for a while. But companies usually created more teams for a reason: others also do things the company needs. Almost always, the “faster alone” teams eventually need help from others. At this point, they hit a wall, because things have diverged too much already. The organization becomes “tightly coupled, loosely aligned”, the opposite of Henrik Kniberg’s desired state outlined in his "Spotify engineering culture" posts.

Around this point, leadership often feels the urge to step in to regain control. But instead of clarifying the “why” and “what”, they frequently get drawn into the “how”. That makes things worse. After all, the issue is not the work content, but how the company operates. Well-intended support turns into additional damage: even more people now want a say in things where already too many are involved. The chaos remains, now with more bureaucracy on top.

To avoid these interventions, people start hiding problems from leadership. Step by step, this detaches leadership teams from what actually happens in their organizations.

Over time, these dynamics make it nearly impossible to focus on the company’s aspiration, creating great products and winning customers. The organization drifts into reactive mode until only one goal remains: survive to live another day.

As many of these causes are hard to see, people start blaming others for the problems, suspecting incompetence, laziness, or even ill intent. Trust erodes, functional and team silos harden, the word “they” becomes more popular at the expense of “us”.

These patterns do not only kill an organization’s speed and ability to deliver, they are also exhausting and frustrating for everyone involved. Resignations and burnouts rise, especially among the people you can least afford to lose. Others quietly disengage, putting in less and less real, valuable work. In Alex Komoroske's words: this is “the end point: total, demoralizing chaos”.

The most tragic part: we are talking about growth companies here, not restructuring turnarounds. These companies' external success fuels their internal chaos.

What you can do

If some of this sounds painfully familiar, then the obvious question is “what can I do about it?”. That is what this blog is about: you need to work on your organization’s operating system.

The coordination headwind is not caused by individuals. It comes from how work gets done: how goals are set, how teams are structured, how decisions are made, how processes connect, how information flows. In other words: the headwind emerges from your operating system.

This is why these problems emerge and persist even with smart, committed people and strong effort: the system itself produces them. If that system is incomplete or incoherent, the headwind strengthens. If it is designed deliberately, the headwind weakens. That is why lasting fixes must focus on the system level.

These issues took time to develop and will take time to fix. This is real work. That said, there are a few things you can start doing right now which almost always help:

Acknowledge the headwind: Talk openly about the coordination headwind. It is not happening because “others are idiots”. It is a side effect of growth. You are victims of your own success.
Talk (a lot) about goals: The larger your org gets, the more often you need to repeat what you are aiming for. Do not assume things are clear. Communicate even when you feel you are repeating yourself or do not have all the answers yet.
Enable independent teams: Try to create teams with clear goals, end-to-end ownership and well-defined interfaces, so they can move with minimal central coordination. Invest deliberately in onboarding and training so new hires become independent fast.

What comes next

The three things stated above already help. But again, to keep the coordination headwind at bay, you need to work on your organization’s operating system. The headwind is inevitable, but your operating system decides whether it stays a breeze or turns into a hurricane: each element (people, strategy, priorities, structure, processes & initiatives, and information technology) can either tame or fuel the headwind. My goal is to write about all these elements on this blog.

While multiple elements (or their interactions) may create issues in your org, you cannot fix everything at once. You have a business to run, so you need to be disciplined about where to focus your change effort. That is why the next post will be about how to scan your organization’s operating system so you know where to start.

Why it develops

What it does

What you can do

What comes next

Further reading