Will Jeanne Grosser Always Grow Lean?

Jeanne Grosser will probably always stay on the leaner side of grow as fast as you can. Overgrowing slows the whole machine even when revenue is fine, because people stop having well-defined jobs, step on each other's toes, and add coordination cost. More of the team is brand new and does not know the work than the share that does.

She has to push herself on hiring speed because she liked the efficiency-is-leverage phase at Stripe. The phase forces a deep look at priorities and at how automation and data can meet them, and she calls that a more intellectually interesting way to grow. She also thinks Stripe could have grown revenue faster at some points by adding more people. A leadership offsite in a couple of weeks will ask for the theoretical end state of each function. Across 10 plus go-to-market functions, the questions are whether a group of 10 never needs more than 10, whether 10 people only ever need two added a year, or whether the team scales with revenue without scaling in a straight line, and what else could change the curve for functions that must grow.