The Stand-on-a-Chair Number

There's a threshold in company growth. It happens around 150 people. That's roughly the point where you have to stand on a chair for everyone to hear you.

It's also when the normal tools for alignment start to break down.

The 150-person problem

Below 150 people, alignment happens organically. People know each other. They overhear conversations. They see what's happening. Information flows through proximity and relationships.

Above 150, that stops working. The company fragments into teams. People don't know what other teams are doing. They lose sight of the big picture.

Most companies respond with docs and decks. Strategy documents. Quarterly presentations. OKR spreadsheets. Mission statements pinned to Notion.

These collect dust. People read them once, maybe. Then they go back to their daily work. The connection between what they do today and what the company is trying to achieve becomes abstract. Distant. Forgotten.

Big rocks, small rocks

The fix isn't better documents. It's connecting the small rocks to the big rocks.

Big rocks are the outcomes that matter. Revenue targets. Product milestones. Customer goals. The things leadership talks about in board meetings.

Small rocks are the daily actions. The tasks. The commitments. The things people actually do with their time.

Most alignment systems focus on big rocks. They assume if you explain the strategy clearly enough, people will figure out the small rocks themselves.

That's backwards. People don't work on strategy. They work on tasks. If you want alignment, you need to connect the tasks to the strategy. Every day. Automatically.

What this looks like in practice

Imagine you're a product manager. Your company's big rock this quarter is improving retention.

In a typical company, you'd hear about this in a quarterly presentation. Maybe you'd set an OKR related to it. Then you'd go back to your backlog and try to remember what you heard.

In an aligned company, every commitment you make is tagged to a strategic priority. When you say "I'll ship the onboarding improvements by Friday," it's automatically connected to the retention goal.

When leadership reviews progress, they don't just see a list of tasks. They see which big rocks are getting attention and which are being neglected.

When you check in on your commitments, you see them in context. You remember why this task matters.

Why docs fail

Strategy docs fail because they're static. You read them once. The world moves on. The doc stays the same.

Alignment requires dynamic connection. When you make a commitment, it should automatically link to what matters. When priorities shift, the connections should update.

This can't happen in a document. It requires a system.

The cascade problem

Traditional alignment cascades goals downward. The CEO sets company goals. VPs set department goals aligned to company goals. Managers set team goals aligned to department goals.

This looks good on paper. In practice, the cascade breaks at every level. Goals get interpreted. Priorities get filtered. By the time it reaches the front line, the connection to the original strategy is tenuous at best.

The solution is to cascade in both directions. Yes, big rocks inform priorities. But small rocks should also roll up. Leadership should see what people are actually working on, connected to strategic priorities.

This creates feedback loops. If everyone is working on things that don't connect to the big rocks, something is wrong. Either the work is misaligned, or the big rocks are wrong. Either way, you learn something.

The daily standup problem

Many teams try to solve alignment with daily standups. Everyone shares what they're working on. In theory, this creates visibility.

In practice, standups become ritual. People share updates without context. "Working on the API" doesn't tell you how it connects to company priorities. After five minutes, everyone forgets what they heard.

The fix isn't eliminating standups. It's adding context. Every update should reference the strategic priority it serves. Over time, this builds muscle memory. People start thinking about their work in terms of outcomes, not just activities.

Making it automatic

Manual alignment doesn't scale. You can't rely on people remembering to connect their work to strategy. They're busy. They'll forget.

The best alignment systems are automatic. When you capture a commitment from a meeting, it prompts for a priority connection. When you check in, it shows the strategic context.

This removes friction. Alignment becomes a byproduct of normal work, not an additional task.

The bottom line

At 150 people, you have to stand on a chair to be heard. But you can't stand on a chair every day. You need systems that connect daily actions to big-picture outcomes.

Docs and decks won't do it. They're static. Alignment requires dynamic, automatic connection between small rocks and big rocks.

When everyone sees how their work connects to what matters, alignment happens. Not through presentations. Through action.