When Growth Brings Drag: A Personal Reflection

A few years ago, we were a 300–400 person company. Nimble, fast-moving, and tightly aligned. Everyone knew who to speak to, decisions happened quickly, and execution felt natural.

Today, we are over 2,500 people, and while the scale is something to be proud of, it has also come with a challenge I didn’t fully appreciate early on: internal friction.

It’s not the competition that slows us down. It’s us.

As we’ve grown, so have our layers, systems, tools, approval chains, and processes. What once took a day now takes a week. What used to be a quick conversation sometimes becomes a series of meetings. And people, good people, feel stuck, not because of intent, but because of how the machine now moves.

I’ve seen this friction show up in my previous organization as well, whenever we grew rapidly. And I’ve seen how leaders respond. Some become master navigators—they simplify, align, and remove blockers.

Others struggle because their strategies can’t cut through the internal noise.

Recently, I came across a blog post by Tanmay Vora that brought this idea to life for me. He visually captured the core message of The Friction Project, a book by Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, which explores how workplace complexity creates drag, and what smart leaders do to address it.

Their core idea is simple but powerful:

Good leaders act as friction fixers. They make it easier to do the right things and harder to do the wrong ones.

Not by adding more control but by removing obstacles.

Tanmay’s visual summary hit home:

What stands out is how consistent these friction-fixing leaders are across a few specific competencies:

• Clarity creation – They constantly ask: “What’s getting in the way?” and then work to simplify.
• Decision flow – They shorten decision loops, empower teams, and reduce unnecessary escalation.
• Process discipline – They streamline what matters and aren’t afraid to retire what no longer serves.
• Empathy for execution – They understand how things work on the ground and stay connected to the user experience, internal or external.
• Courage to subtract – They’re not enamored by complexity. They’re willing to remove what slows the system down, even if it was once a good idea.

At this stage of our journey, this is the leadership muscle I’m most focused on building. Because if we don’t consciously fix the friction that creeps in as we scale, no amount of ambition or strategy will get us where we want to go.