All of our Scaling articles

The Secret to Running Effective Growth Sprints — Follow This Process to Learn Faster

"With every growth experiment, you're not just trying to optimize your return on ad spend, lower your CPA, or bag a few new logos ahead of the next fundraise. You're fundamentally learning and making progress toward a simple question: How are we going to grow this business?"

How Talent Teams Can Better Weather Boom-and-Bust Cycles — Advice from Two Decades at Gem, Facebook, and Robinhood

Richard Cho has led talent acquisition teams at large tech firms for the better part of two decades. He’s collected the lessons he’s learned from operating in both hiring booms and busts, offering a thoughtful guide on how startup talent teams can do more — with less.

How to Scale Yourself Down — Not Up — as a Leader

After a four-decade career of toggling back and forth between big and small, Lightspark SVP of Engineering James Everingham shares his playbook for scaling down your leadership as you go from an org of hundreds or thousands to a handful of direct reports.

‘Give Away Your People’ — How Managers Can (and Should) Prep for High Performers to Leave

Seasoned startup operator Clarissa Shen offers a fresh perspective on Molly Graham’s ‘Give Away Your Legos’ framework by sharing her own tactics on how to proactively manage for high performers to leave.

Investing in Internal Documentation: A Brick-by-Brick Guide for Startups

David Nunez, an early hire at Stripe and Uber, shares his step-by-step playbook for establishing good internal documentation habits at your startup. He unpacks his tested tactics for creating a culture of documentation, setting the quality bar and keeping things organized.

23 Tactical Company Building Lessons, Learned From Scaling Stripe & Notion

From Stripe to Notion, Cristina Cordova has worked on some of the biggest products in tech. She shares tactical tidbits on what she’s learned about about scaling companies and shaping your career.

The 25 Micro-Habits of High-Impact Managers

Sharp folks from across the First Round community share the small habits that great managers do, including delivering feedback with care, opening up about failure, and sending praise up the chain.

Counterintuitive Lessons on How to Get Better as You Scale, From Twilio’s Jeff Lawson

13 years after Twilio first launched, CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson opens up about the peaks and valleys to share a set of unconventional company building lessons on how to get better as you scale — from introducing new products and refining go-to-market strategies to focusing annual planning.

This VP is Doing Things Differently in the Product Org — Here’s His Playbook

As the VP of Product at Divvy, Tyler Hogge shares his tips for truly empowering your product managers to deliver outcomes, including aligning with revenue teams and adding variable comp.