A practical guide to growing teams without killing the culture that made you successful.
Building people operations for a growing startup is the ultimate Goldilocks problem.
Too little structure creates chaos. Too much kills your culture.
Finding that perfect middle ground is the key to your team being able to excel in the places that make your business flourish versus watching a bunch of headless chickens running around.
Aspen Egan felt the weight of this challenge when she first joined Blip as an intern six years ago. During that time, the company grew from 30 to 65 employees while transitioning to fully remote work across 13 states—creating what she describes as “role ambiguity on steroids.”
“As we grew, everyone kept wearing multiple hats. What worked when we were 30 people quickly turned into blurred responsibilities and unclear ownership at 65,” Aspen explains. The overlap of roles made it nearly impossible to pinpoint gaps in the processes or assign any modicum of accountability.
What do you even do when you can’t point to a single person responsible for driving specific metrics?
Today, as Blip’s Senior Manager of Business and People Operations, Aspen has built systems that create order without creating bottlenecks—using what she calls the “minimum effective dose” principle. During a major company restructure that reduced headcount from 65 to 41 employees, these systems helped maintain zero voluntary turnover in the following 12 months.
Here’s how to get it just right.
The Line Between Scaling and Failing
The core challenge is finding the time to build the right people operations for your specific stage, team, and goals. When you’re resource-strapped, every system you implement has to earn its keep. There’s no budget for elaborate platforms that collect cobwebs, and no patience for policies that slow everyone down.
The margin for error is razor thin.
A single bad hire can shift team dynamics for months. (We’ve all been there.)
A feedback system that employees shrug off wastes precious time. (We’ve all ignored those surveys.)
It seems all the more impossible when everyone’s working remotely. You lose the informal conversations that once solved problems organically, and suddenly need systematic ways to maintain alignment across time zones and personalities.
The Minimum Effective Dose Framework
So what do you do when your resources are limited? Well, you do just enough. Aspen developed a framework based on the concept of the minimum effective dose—providing just enough structure to drive outcomes and consistency without adding unnecessary friction.
Here’s how it works.
Apply the three-question filter
Before implementing any new people ops system or structure, Aspen asks herself three things:
- Does this solve a real problem that Blip has right now?
- Will this work at 2 times the headcount?
- Can it evolve without requiring massive rework or budget?
Applying this filter as a first step means saving wasted effort on solutions that dazzle on paper but don’t address real needs in practice. It also ensures that any system you build today won’t break when your team grows, and can adapt with your business instead of demanding costly reworks again and again and (sometimes even) again.
Map roles by function, not by person
Early-stage companies tend to naturally lean towards building roles around individual capabilities when scaling their teams. But this creates problems when role clarity becomes essential for growth.
Aspen’s solution to this: Stop looking at people first.
Don’t get the wrong idea; your people are important, but you have to design for function first.
“When we approach org planning, we don’t start with an org chart based on people—we start with a role chart,” Aspen explains. “We map out the core needs of each department first, then align people to those clearly defined roles. That shift makes it easier to see gaps, spot overlaps, and ensure accountability.”
This prevents teams from getting stuck thinking about what “Jane” or “Mike” can do, and forces them to think about what actually needs to get done. You’re designing for the role, not the person.
This approach shifts the focus from people to purpose. When you’re not building your org structure around specific individuals, it becomes much easier to spot where you’re missing key functions or where responsibilities are overlapping—and scale with confidence.
Create consistent communication rhythms
Even if everyone knows what they’re supposed to do, distributed teams need regular touchpoints to stay aligned and accountable. But not all meetings are created equal.
Aspen’s two-meeting system separates performance from culture:
Weekly Business Reviews: These are led by the COO and get into the nitty gritty of performance, numbers, and accountability. Team members are called on to explain wins and address gaps in real time.
Monthly All-Hands: Led by Aspen herself, these cover everything outside the numbers: announcements, employee spotlights, department updates, and mission/vision reinforcement from leadership.
Separating out performance meetings ensures these discussions don’t get diluted with cultural content, while culture building doesn’t get overshadowed by metrics pressure. (So, Betty from Brooklyn and Charlie from Chicago can still have a space to debate which city has the better pizza.)
Support managers through flexible tools
Rather than mandating rigid processes, provide frameworks that managers can customize for their teams. Blip provides tools like Lucidchart templates for structuring roles, expectation setting, and career development conversations, and managers can adjust these resources to fit their team’s specific needs.
“We made one-on-one meetings a requirement for managers,” Aspen says. “But we didn’t prescribe a rigid format. Instead, we provide templates to help structure the meetings, while still allowing managers and employees to adapt them to their needs. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach.”
The key is framing guidelines and tools as things that make employees’ jobs easier, not as ways to monitor or control them. When managers see resources as ways to multiply their effectiveness—not rules to follow—they’re more likely to use them consistently and creatively.
Make structured feedback feel less like homework
Complex feedback systems often backfire spectacularly. Employees will engage with systems that respect their time and intelligence.
Focus on questions that feel more like a conversation vs. an interrogation.
Aspen ran into this exact issue when her elaborate peer review process (think very in-depth questions and surveys that gobbled up time) achieved only 20% participation. She realized she had to strip everything down to what really matters—two core questions that got to the heart of peer feedback.
“What is your peer’s superpower? Where should they focus to develop their next superpower? That was it,” she explains. This two question left-right hook comes as a nod to how many larger tech companies approach their HR, but adapting to the needs of Blip.
No word minimums, no required examples, no elaborate rating scales.
Participation surged following this simple edit, and the feedback became much more thoughtful and actionable.
The most critical—and often overlooked—element of any feedback system is follow-through.
No one likes to fill out a survey and then feel like that feedback went nowhere.
When there’s proof that feedback is being heard and (we cannot stress the importance of this “and” enough) being applied, it serves as fuel for employees to continue engaging with future requests.
When Systems Meet Reality
When tested under pressure, Aspen’s minimum effective dose approach proved its value.
- Zero voluntary turnover after a major restructure
- A custom performance review system built in 3 months with no spend
- Company growth that didn’t sacrifice culture or benefits like unlimited PTO
- Teams able to focus on core business functions (marketing, product development, customer service)
The minimum effective dose framework doesn’t mean doing as little as possible. It means focusing your limited time and attention on what matters most. Start with Aspen’s 3-question filter. Then build clear roles before processes, separate performance from culture in your meetings, and simplify everything until it works.
Your ultimate goal should be creating a people ops system that works for you. That means a system that works with your budget and tech stack, boosts your company culture, and frees your team to focus on revenue-driving activities like marketing campaigns, customer acquisition, and business growth (bye bye red tape).
Because when you get the people side right, your marketing team can focus on what they do best—growing your business. Your sales team can close deals instead of managing internal confusion. Your product team can build features instead of clamoring over who owns what. That’s the difference between SMBs that scale and SMBs that stall.
