How to Keep Everyone Aligned as You Grow (Without Drowning in Process)

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When you’re still a very small company or team, collaboration is easy. You hop on a call, make quick decisions, ship it. Nothing’s written down because it lives in everyone’s head.

As you grow, that starts to break down in the following ways:

• Work gets scattered across various tools and threads
• Decisions are made in DMs and never recorded
• New hires can’t find context

Founders still act as a router for everything, creating bottlenecks

You don’t need a heavy process - you need a lightweight collaboration backbone.

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Stage one (1–5 people): Founders only

Hidden trap: Over-optimizing for speed, under-investing in structure.

Symptoms:

• “Didn’t we already talk about this?” conversations keep repeating
• You reinvent the same doc/plan/process every time
• Customers or stakeholders get different answers depending on who they ask

Set up just enough:

• Jira: One space, simple Kanban (To Do / In Progress / Done). A few issue types (Task, Bug, Story).
• Confluence: One space as your “company brain.”
  • Home page with mission and key links
  • A few core pages: “How we work,” “Product ideas,” “Customer notes”
• Code: Bitbucket (or your Git provider) with basic PR flow
• Loom: Quick async demos and decision summaries
• Rovo: Summarize and help generate content, so nothing lives only in someone’s head

Goal: One place to track work, one place to store and find knowledge.

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Stage 2 (6–15 people): First Team Stage

Hidden trap: Informal processes break, but nobody wants “bureaucracy.” This is when you shift from “a group of individuals” to teams.

Symptoms:

• People aren’t sure who owns what (“Is this Product or Platform? Who decides?”)
• Issues completing work on time when multiple people are involved
• The same questions show up in Slack over and over (“Where’s the latest X?”)

Patterns that help:

• Jira spaces per team
  • One space per persistent team (e.g., Product, Platform, GTM)
  • Own backlog, board, and simple workflow per team
• Confluence for decisions & repeatable work
  • Lightweight decision log (context, options, decision, owner, date)
  • Simple templates for one‑page specs, runbooks, onboarding checklists
• Loom instead of status meetings
  • 5–10 minute weekly Loom walking through the Jira board and priorities
• Rovo remembers everything for you, so you don’t have to
  • “Where is X?” Answer engine across Jira and Confluence.

Goal: Clear ownership per team, and decisions that live somewhere other than chat.

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Stage 3 (16–30 people): Coordination Stage

Hidden trap: You add people, but the output doesn’t increase.

Symptoms:

• No shared view of priorities
• Dependencies between work items and teams fall through the cracks
• Too many tools, no clear source of truth

You need intentional coordination:

• Jira for cross‑team visibility
  • Epics/parent epics or Advanced Roadmaps to roll up work
  • Dashboards for leadership and leads to see progress and blockers
• Confluence as “Company Home”
  • Top-level page/space explaining structure, linking team spaces, and surfacing goals/OKRs
  • Team spaces for roadmaps, specs, runbooks, meeting notes, retros, decisions
• Compass for service ownership (engineering)
  • Catalog of services with owners, on‑call, repos, docs
• Loom for company‑wide async updates
  • Monthly founder update, embedded in Confluence, instead of more all‑hands
• Rovo summarizes status across projects, teams, and services.

Goal: Anyone can answer “What’s going on?” without a meeting.

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Have any processes or best practices that have worked well for your team/s? Share in the comments below!