Everyone knows the cliché: startups move fast, big companies move like glaciers. The founder’s real fear in scaling is becoming the glacier — waking up one day to find that the company that used to ship in a weekend now needs a month and three meetings to decide anything.
What keeps speed alive at scale is a forcing function, and I use a simple formula for building them: Target, Deadline, Reason.
- Target — the thing you need to accomplish. Say, sharper product positioning.
- Deadline — a firm date it has to be done by. A sales kickoff, a marquee customer meeting.
- Reason — the “why” that ties the two together. “We’ve got a room full of customers at this event, and we’re going to show them the new vision.”
All three, or it doesn’t work. “We need to do this” produces nothing. “We need to do this by the 15th because we’re putting it in front of our top 20 customers” produces movement. Give a team the target, the date, and a reason they actually believe, and they’ll rally. Leave one out and you’ve got a to-do nobody’s in a hurry about.
Use real events, not fake Mondays
The best deadlines are the ones you didn’t invent. As you scale, the calendar fills with events that make natural forcing functions — the key word being real.
“Let’s get this done by next Monday” is not a forcing function. A room full of customers is.
- Sales kickoffs and QBRs. If sales needs new collateral, a better demo, refreshed positioning, the kickoff is the deadline. Everything ships by then.
- Product launches. The most natural forcing function there is. Pick the release date and build backward — training, collateral, messaging, customer readiness all pinned to it.
- Quarterly offsites. Good deadlines for the decisions and plans that need to get locked instead of left drifting.
- Field marketing events. Hosting a customer dinner in New York? That’s your reason to sharpen the pitch and build a demo worth showing. A room of prospects three weeks out concentrates the mind.
And you can manufacture these yourself. Deciding to host that NYC dinner is a perfectly good way to set a deadline and light a fire — push for a tighter pitch, pull in a key partner, build the new demo to show there. When you set the timeline, though, it has to be real. If you’re genuinely excited about it and can say why it matters, the team will feel it too.
If everything’s urgent, nothing is
This is where most people blow it. Manufacture too many deadlines, or set ones nobody believes, and people catch on fast — and once they’ve decided your dates aren’t real, the tool is gone. You can only cry wolf so many times.
So the forcing function has to be genuine. That NYC dinner can’t be something you pulled out of the air on Tuesday. It should be a real moment — one you’ve mentioned in your weekly notes, that the sales team is fired up about, that a partner wants in on, that you honestly believe will open real doors.
Authentic stakes are what create urgency. Arbitrary pressure just creates cynicism.
Bigger events set the yearly rhythm
The largest events — customer conferences, sales kickoffs — are where you rally the whole company around one message and push everyone to do their best work. The rhythm I’ve found: alternate every six months between an internal event like a sales kickoff and an external one like a customer conference.
That matters more as you scale, because your strategy naturally stretches to an annual timeline. Rolling out new positioning, training the sales team on new products, resetting messaging — none of it happens in a quarter. Anchoring to a couple of big events a year gives the whole organization a set of real deadlines to move toward together, instead of a hundred small ones that never add up to anything.
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