Scaling shouldn't mean
slowing down.
I'm Robin Hyman. I help growing companies keep the clarity, ownership and speed of a small team, and give leaders early warning when things drift off course. Sometimes that means OKRs done properly. It always means fewer priorities and faster feedback loops.
No hard sell. Talk through your situation, leave with an actionable next step.
Two decades across software delivery and organisational change, with organisations including the BBC, Rolls-Royce, Citibank, NatWest and Loqbox.
You used to know everything that was going on.
Founders tell me the same story: at ten people, problems were spotted early, decisions were fast, the team felt energised. Then the company grew.
You find out late
Problems now surface as escalations and quarter-end surprises. By the time trouble shows in the numbers, the correction is expensive.
Coordination eats the gains
More people means more meetings and more handoffs, and energy shifts from growth to friction. Everyone is busy, but less gets finished.
Five leaders, five answers
Ask your leadership team what matters most right now. If their answers differ, it isn't because they're not paying attention. The strategy lacks focus.
None of this is anyone's fault. It's just what scale does, unless you build a counterweight.
The drag of scale compounds.
Fast by default
Good habits cost you almost nothing now and pay off for years.
Drag: negligibleThe gains get eaten
Coordination overhead builds quietly. This is where most of my clients call.
Drag: buildingYou pay to unpick it
What would have been habit-forming is now a transformation programme. And a harder sale internally.
Drag: structuralIt's far cheaper to act early than to retrofit, but the fix is the same shape either way.
The fix is a loop, not a plan
The longer you stay off course, the larger the correction needed.
Set direction.
A few clear objectives, not a wish list.
Do the work.
Teams own the how.
Measure.
Unambiguous results, not activity.
Adjust.
Small, frequent corrections on a short cycle.
The best-tested implementation of this loop is OKRs, refined over fifty years from Intel to Google. But the principles come first, and I'm not here to sell you a framework. Some of my engagements barely mention one.
What I believe
Fewer priorities beat better tracking.
If everything is important, the tooling doesn't matter.
Good systems remove process, not add it.
If a new framework creates more meetings than it kills, it has failed.
Measure outcomes, not activity.
Busy is not a result.
Cadence beats ceremony.
A blunt weekly check moves more than a polished quarterly review.
My job is to leave.
Every engagement builds your capability, not my dependency.
People arrive here three ways
"We've grown and everything got slower."
You're scaling and the old informality has stopped working. Start with the health check, or go straight to the Diagnostic.
Take the health check →"We did OKRs. Nothing changed."
Your rollout stalled, probably in one of three predictable ways. The Diagnostic will tell you which, and whether it's worth another attempt.
About the Diagnostic →"I want earlier warning across my portfolio."
You're an investor or board member and the monthly pack tells you about trouble after it's expensive. There's a page for you.
For investors →Start small. Prove it. Then scale what works.
Health check
Ten questions, scored instantly. A quick, honest read on where your execution leaks.
Take it now →Execution Diagnostic
Interviews and a working session with your leadership team. You get a findings report, a prioritised fix list, and a straight recommendation, even if it's "don't hire me."
What's included →Fix & embed
A scoped engagement to make the changes stick, run as consultancy, training, or a fractional role, depending on what the diagnostic finds.
Ways of working →Who I work with, and who I don't
A good fit
Leadership teams of roughly 20–500-person organisations, or units that size inside bigger ones, who own their delivery, will be in the room themselves, and are willing to cut the priority list rather than re-label it. Guidance scales with size: at ten people this is habits; at fifty it's structure; at a hundred and fifty it's an operating model. The earlier you start, the cheaper it is.
Not a good fit
Teams shopping for an OKR tool rollout. Organisations that want OKRs "done to" their people without leadership involved. Anyone hoping a 200-page playbook will change behaviour.
Behind Outcome Vectors
I've spent over 20 years in software engineering, delivery and organisational change: as an engineer, a delivery leader, and a coach to executives and teams. My work splits between growing companies that are starting to feel the drag of scale, and teams whose OKR rollouts didn't deliver. That second group is increasingly sponsored by the investors and boards who feel the consequences first.
More about me →Insights
Occasional writing on focus and delivery: the arguments behind the method.
Scaling Without Losing Focus
As organisations grow, the informal mechanisms that kept everyone aligned stop working. Scaling well means replacing proximity with deliberately designed systems for focus, visibility and feedback.
Read →Choosing Metrics That Help You Steer: Leading and Lagging Indicators
Leading and lagging indicators aren't two boxes to sort metrics into. They're a way of thinking about cause and effect, and a practical method for finding the measures that let you steer rather than just report.
Read →Find out where the drag is, while it's still cheap to fix.
Take the free health check, or just talk it through with me for 30 minutes.