By month 37, decisions that took 6 hours took 6 days.
That story feels familiar to any founder or executive who has lived through hyper-growth from $100M to $300M ARR. The charts look healthy. Revenue climbs. Headcount expands. New leaders arrive to “help things run smoothly.”
Six quarters later, the company moves more slowly than it did at half its size.
This article uses Shopify’s restructuring as a useful reference point and then focuses on the practical lesson for CEOs and CHROs. Hyper-growth rewards operators. The wrong layers turn speed into coordination work. The right hiring choices keep decisions close to the work.
When growth adds layers instead of speed
Shopify expanded its workforce by thousands of people in a short window. The company needed more engineers, more product teams, more sales coverage, more support. Alongside this, it introduced new managers, leads, and program roles to help coordinate.
On paper, it all made sense.
In practice, a quiet shift took place inside the work:
- Timelines stretched as more people were added to each decision.
- Managers spent hours aligning updates across teams instead of building.
- Meetings multiplied to “sync” priorities across product, marketing, and go-to-market.
- Simple approvals sat in inboxes because nobody felt full accountability.
Nothing broke in one dramatic moment. The change arrived through ordinary days. A quick product tweak now required three meetings. A marketing test waited for legal, then brand, then finance. A hiring decision paused for one more stakeholder.
The company still grew. The charts still looked good. Yet the distance between people making decisions and people doing the work expanded month after month.
Why do middle layers grow so fast in hyper-growth
From $100M to $300M ARR, executives face a real tension.
On one side, complexity grows: more customers, more products, more regions, more regulatory exposure, more board expectations. On the other side, there is a fear of chaos. Leaders respond by adding roles designed to “keep everyone aligned.”
These roles often sit in the middle:
- Program managers to coordinate across teams
- Chiefs of staff to support senior leaders
- Layered team leads between ICs and executives
- Committees to review pricing, roadmap, or brand
Each new role has a rational justification. It solves a pain that leaders feel in the moment. Over time, however, these layers change how work moves:
- Information travels upward for approval instead of sideways for collaboration.
- People wait for “green lights” instead of moving with clear ownership.
- Risk shifts from “I own this decision” to “the group will decide.”
Layers feel like progress. Six months later, they feel like friction.
The early signals are easy to miss
By the time a company announces a restructuring, slow decisions have already become normal. For CEOs and CHROs, the real work happens far earlier, inside the patterns of daily execution.
Three early signals stand out.
1. Approvals linger quietly
Documents sit in review for days. Small spend decisions wait for sign off. Leaders start hearing phrases like “still with legal” or “waiting for feedback from the steering group.”
What changed is not the difficulty of the decision. The distance between owner and approver grew, and responsibility blurred.
2. Meetings grow in number and audience
Calendar load climbs. One meeting becomes three. Updates shift from clear written summaries to recurring status calls with fifteen attendees.
Leaders feel informed but not closer to the work. Teams feel busy but not more productive.
3. Accountability blurs across teams
Multiple leaders share responsibility for the same outcome. Marketing and product share growth metrics. Sales and success share renewal accountability. Everybody touches the result, yet nobody can move independently.
When something slips, there is always a reason and always another group involved. The story sounds rational. The outcome still misses.
These signals appear long before a board asks hard questions about execution. They live in how people describe their week.
Why recruiting operators matters more than adding coordinators
Once a company recognizes this pattern, the temptation is to “fix” it internally through a new process. Clear RACI charts. Steering groups. Operating principles.
Process helps, but only if the people in key roles behave like operators.
Operators do three things consistently:
- They make decisions with limited information.
- They communicate directly with the people who do the work.
- They move initiatives forward without waiting for perfect clarity.
In recruiting, that profile looks different from a pure coordinator. Coordinators optimize information flow. Operators optimize outcomes.
For CEOs and CHROs, this has concrete implications:
- Prioritize leaders who owned real P and L or product outcomes, not only “alignment” functions.
- Test for judgment under uncertainty, not only the polish of communication.
- Ask for examples where candidates removed steps and sign-offs, not where they added frameworks.
Operators remove handoffs instead of adding them. They build structures that keep engineers, designers, and sellers close to the customer and close to the data that informs decisions.
Keeping decisions close to the work
Direct accountability scales faster than layered oversight.
In practice, this looks like:
- Smaller, fully accountable teams that own metrics end-to-end.
- Clear decision owners for each product, feature, or market move.
- Written decision records that explain context, tradeoffs, and next steps.
- Leaders who spend more time in working sessions with their teams than in cross-functional status reviews.
The distance between idea and action matters more than the number of frameworks in place. The teams that move quickest share three conditions:
- They know exactly who can make which decisions.
- They see the impact of those decisions in real numbers.
- They can adjust without waiting for a monthly forum.
When these conditions hold, people closer to the customer feel empowered to act. Senior leaders guide direction, set constraints, and clear obstacles instead of making every choice.
Lessons from restructuring for the next stage of growth
Shopify’s decision in 2023 to remove layers of middle management and reduce busywork reflected a broader truth for hyper-growth companies. Scale depends less on headcount and more on the quality of accountability.
The lesson for CEOs and CHROs is simple and demanding.
- Use recruiting to protect speed, not just fill boxes in an org chart.
- Challenge every new layer that sits between decision and execution.
- Promote leaders who build teams that ship, learn, and own outcomes.
The more layers between decision and action, the slower a company becomes.
Hyper-growth rewards people who build, own, and move. Speed lives in the hands of those who stay close to the work.