If you’re a founder or technical executive of a company that has recently reached or is about to reach Product/Market Fit (PMF), this series of five short articles is targeted at you.

We discuss how, compared to your pre-PMF phase, you will need to change your company culture and mindset and evolve your organisation and various processes. We provide some useful tips to help you effect that transition.

While the papers mainly discuss growing your technical teams – Product and Engineering – many of the topics discussed here may be of interest to other functions as well. We will however not be able to cover the details for these other functions, nor will we discuss the transition to a full scale-up company with hundreds or thousands of employees.

The goal of these papers is to provide food for thought and to help you start thinking about the right questions, even though there are many aspects we won’t be able to cover here.

The series is structured as follows:

  • In Part 1, we start discussing what it means to move from pre- to post-PMF and what new challenges you’ll need to face.
  • Part 2 provides insights into how you can scale your company culture to deal with those challenges.
  • Part 3 discusses scaling aspects that are common to both Product and Engineering.
  • Part 4 focuses specifically on how you need to evolve your Product discipline.
  • Lastly, Part 5 discusses aspects that are specific to your Engineering team.

The main takeaways from the series include the following:

  • Scaling your company to sustain your growth post-PMF requires a deliberate and focused effort.
  • You and your entire team need to learn to avoid making avoidable mistakes so that your company can spend most of its energy on adding value for your customers.
  • At this stage, first-time founders may consider bringing in senior talent that has prior experience with doing things for and at scale.

About the authors

Dan Teodosiu

Dan is an Executive in Residence at Balderton where he’s been advising portfolio companies on a variety of topics including managing and scaling Engineering teams, productivity, strategy and interaction between Engineering and Product, technical and architectural choices, hiring and mentoring.

Dan has over 30 years of industry experience with scale-ups (as the CTO of Criteo and Onfido), large companies (Google, Microsoft, HPE, Alcatel) and startups (as a founder and technical advisor). Dan sits on the boards of Revolut and QIMA Ltd.

David Vismans

David was an Executive in Residence at Balderton between 2022 and 2024, advising portfolio companies on a variety of topics including Product strategy, Product organisation design, Product discovery, validation methods and experimentation, Product development execution challenges and opportunities, hiring and mentoring, and Product reviews.

Before Balderton and current advisory work, David was Chief Product Officer at Booking.com for 9 years. Prior to that, he worked for social networking company Hyves and navigation company TomTom. David has a background in Artificial Intelligence.

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