What I think is missing in this is the matter of customer service. Get that right and everything follows, get that wrong and you are going to be slowed down by growth because far too much customer service time is spent along the way.

Imagine you sell a simple widget available in three sizes and two colours. A very simple product. Yet 10% of sales result in returns. If it takes you three days to respond to returns requests and then another hour processing a return weeks after the customer requested it then you are also going to have some damage done to your company brand on social media and customers that will not buy from you again.

It is not actually the widget that is the product, it is the whole sales process for that widget via the website that is the product. The customer service aspects of it need to be done really well before you grow. In the above example you can build out the forms for managing returns so that there is minimal effort needed, a scan and a mouse click in the warehouse, all communication with the customer handled totally automatically and procedures in place for the parts of the process that do need a human.

It can take weeks of work to get all of the customer service elements working properly, many of those aspects might seem to fail cost benefit analysis at the start, why spend ages making neat forms so your customer can return your product when you are really concerned with selling the product? Yet, if growth happens, this will be important. It could take an hour to process a returned widget when you take into account what happens in the warehouse, the office and in accounts. Or this task could be done in a leisurely five minutes if organised. The former is bad for the brand, the latter much better. You could get ten returned widgets a day, taking all day to do. This would deny you the time to build out those customer service forms needed for the five minute process to happen. You would need to hire an order manager person or a programmer to put the back end systems in place or else you are going to be stuck processing returns for unhappy customers, late, all day, every day. Maybe if you work hard they will not rate your widgets so badly.

So it is a classic step in time saves nine. But the product isn't just the widget, it is the distribution and customer service. Customers won't be able to love your product if they cannot get it or if you cannot sort their problems out with it.

Now managers with sales targets to hit could start advertising the widget before all of the customer service parts are in place. They may view too many returns as a nice problem to have and just think they can hire some interns if help is needed with that. Growth is gone for, widgets sell well but with the ten fold increase in sales is a ten fold increase in returns. Before long a whole returns department is established. This gains its own inertia and involves so many people that it becomes practically impossible to implement a simple form change to speed up customer returns.

The widget itself can be quite boring, it doesn't have to set the world on fire. The product is bigger than that, it is the brand, customer service and other things. This is what customers must love, and part of building a product they love is the dull customer service stuff. If you don't get those bits finished before you grow then you are just growing the amount of work for yourself.