Your Company Doesn’t Have A Scaling Issue. It’s Got A Coordination Debt Issue!

It’s 2026 and from now, we’ll understand the problem first and then apply the appropriate solution.

Hey — is that…is that a camera recording us on the roof? Quick, look happy. Source

For any SaaS company, as it grows and increases in number of employee and departments, a very specific kind of problem begins to appear that seems to be not going away no matter how many hires you throw at it.

In the wilderness of SaaS businesses it is typically called as scaling problem, meaning we don’t have enough people to speed up our processes. However that’s not the case, because the actual problem you’re facing is coordination debt. And no, hiring more people, more project managers isn’t going to solve it.

That will worsen it. Hurry up, do something, or it will eat up your business from the inside.

Did someone say, eat up from inside? ‘Coz that’s what we do! Source

What’s a Coordination Debt?

Just like a technical debt in IT industry, a hastily written code patched for today will later require even more attention and hard work to fix the initial problem.

If you don’t give proper attention and diligence to any implicit process and just throw a hasty “Just slack me, would you?” anytime they appear, you’re basically inviting unnecessary risks and complications that will be expensive.

So, here’s the deal, when you were starting your amazing company, you had like 10 people. And coordination was basically free.

Everyone knew, you especially, what everyone was working on because you talked about it over lunch.

Back then there was no system and it was fine, because those 10 people were the system.

Then you got growth and you now had 30 people, 100 people and now, talking to each other system wasn’t working anymore. It now has an invisible bureaucracy that no one intentionally put there and it’s not gonna change either.

That’s coordination debt.

To find this coordination debt, I’ll hide myself in this uh, Sonic suit I got from a hobo near our office. Source

The Symptoms of Coordination Debt

If you see these situations arising in your ecosystem, you know you’ve been bit.

The Duplicate Work Problem

Your two different IT teams have produced the same internal tool during a three week burn and neither knew what the other guys were working on.

This revelation occurs in a company all-hands and it’s just tragic. Comically tragic.

The Decision Black Hole

So, someone over the slack team raises a good question. And like ravenous reddit niche sub, 20 or so people react with an “OMG Eyes” emoji. Nobody actually does any more than this and the question remains unanswered. Two weeks later, the person who asked the question just makes a personal call on their own and hopes that it all works out in the end.

The Onboarding Roulette.

This is what almost everyone of us experienced when we entered this industry at some point. Every new hire has a different understanding of how the real work is supposed to be done in your company.

Depending on who onboards them, one person would have what the real process is actually like, another knows the process from 2022, while a third hire only knows that 4th floor is haunted.

I don’t know what’s wrong here. Seems like an ordinary non-haunted hallway to me. Source

The Alignment Tax

So, you might not even know this but most possibly your product roadmap requires sign-off from your engineering department, design department, legal department, sales, marketing, and some guy named Gregory from finance who got added to this email chain 3 years ago. The last remaining Gregory left a year ago and no one removed his name from the chain.

A green light for a product nowadays costs more time than actually building it.

The Invisible Bottleneck

Multiple important decision now wait in line because over the years everyone learned to ask or wait up on people who don’t have “managers” in their roles.

Routing the important decision making questions through these individuals when nobody formally assigned as the bottlenecks, slows down the processes.

It’s like a mold appearing somewhere in your home, slowly, quietly and it’s a serious problem by the time you notice it.

I am not a real mold depiction, I’m just a rooster illusion. Source

Why Does It Happen?

Coordination debt isn’t a sign that your leadership is incompetent. But it’s actually math. Inevitable.

The number of communication links in a team grows with a mathematical formula: n(n-1)/2.

So, a team of 5 has 10 links. A team of 10 has 45 links. And a team of 100 has 4,950 links!

You can’t control all aspects of all communication links at all possible times. You don’t have a system that’s fast enough to handle that sort of complexity since you were too busy building the product, closing deals, and putting out the fire that suddenly erupted on the 4th floor 3 a.m. on Friday.

The number of communication links in a team grows at n(n-1)/2. A team of 5 has 10 links. A team of 50 has 1,225. You didn’t build communication systems fast enough to handle that complexity because you were too busy building the product, closing deals, and putting out the fire that started in the infrastructure at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday.

This coordination debt accumulates in the gaps between roles, teams, and tools. You thought you would come back to design a better process when things would slow down a little, but they never did, did they?

What are some actual Solutions (And Not Buzzwords)

1. Name Your Decision-Making Framework and Actually Use It

Pick anything. DACI or RACI, whatever process here works out for you. These acronyms will not help you sleep at night. Their implementation for every important decision will. The acronyms in themselves aren’t the key, it’s to get to the answer for: Who has the final call?

If the answer’s just, “We’ll figure this collaboratively” then congrats, the arbitrary mold of coordination debt just got worse. Always remember, collaboration is a great tool to generate ideas but not a good one to make a decision.

2. Make Work Visible (Radically So)

Your teams should know what other teams are currently working on. Not through some mandatory all-hands presentation but through a system. One that holds a shared roadmap. A project board that encompasses the company with a weekly asynchronous update that’s two paragraphs and not a short novel so people actually read it.

The goal should be to make accidental duplication of work impossible to occur, not a natural probability.

3. Treat Your Processes Like Your Codebase

Your communication board process should be versioned, documented, and routinely reviewed. That may sound obsessive but you must realize that you’re probably running at least four different incident response processes across four different teams.

And no one would know which one is the canonical one.

A simple internal wiki would help. Not a massive labyrinth — no. a well-maintained, simple and searchable source base. Every process lives here. At every change someone updates it. This might seem a radical concept but it is way more effective than just throwing new hires at slowdowns.

Not everything should be canon. Unless it’s Warhammer. Source

4. Shrink Your Approval Chains

If there are decisions that take more than two approvals, map them out and then ask yourself, why though?

You should either straight up eliminate it for each step or make it async. Your legal reviews don’t need meetings. Finance approvals do not need any Zoom calls.

Scrap these unnecessary interferences.

5. Give Teams Actual Autonomy (With Actual Accountability)

The micromanagement in your process chain that’s killing the velocity isn’t usually malicious. It’s there to tell you of unclear ownership.

When no one has surety of who owns what then everyone feels the need to weigh in on everything.

Fix this ASAP. Assign ownership, define team mandates clearly. Document what each team owns.

Let them own it, even the failures.

6. Audit Your Meeting Load

How much time the seniors at your company are spending per week on meetings? Then ask yourself, how many of those are decision-making ones and how many are information-sharing ones? The latter could just be a Notion doc.

You’ll be in disbelief after that.

The goal here isn’t zero meetings. It’s zero unnecessary meetings.

The Uncomfortable Part

Coordination debt isn’t a problem that requires more hires to solve it at all. It wants you to, as the owner, step back a little, observing the actual workflow in your organization, and then redesigning it intentionally.

You’ll have to have awkward conversations about who owns what, killing some projects that need a coordination nobody wants to organize, and admitting that the “collab culture” is just a catalyst in no one feeling accountable for the final call.

It’s not comfortable but totally worth it.

Your Competitors Are Dealing With This Too

Let me tell you something that’s a fact.

You’re not the only one dealing with this.

Coordination debt is a universal fact. It happens to every fast growing SaaS company. And those who win aren’t the ones who never experienced this but those who realized it early and fixed it before it calcified into a permanent organizational dysfunction.

Ready to Actually Do Something About It?

Give yourself just one week for a coordination audit.

Then literally keep track of every decision, meeting, and any cross-team interaction that happens.

Map the slowdown spots, the invisible bottlenecks, and examine every hot potato chain of approvals.

If you do all that for just one week, you’ll find the debt and then you’d be able to pay it off.

Yep. This whole blog was about the good ol’ grind. Source

Found this useful? Forward it to the person in your company who’s been trying to say this exact thing for months but couldn’t find the words. They’ll owe you one.