Startups often move quickly because they have to, making the most of limited resources and adapting as circumstances change. As tech companies scale, added layers of process, approval and hierarchy can gradually slow decision making and erode the flexibility that helped them grow.
The good news is that companies don’t have to abandon the habits that fueled their early success as they expand. Here, Forbes Technology Council members share startup habits established tech companies should preserve—or relearn—to maintain their agility as they grow.
1. Staying Close To Customers
Established tech companies should preserve the startup habit of staying close to the raw customer experience. As organizations scale, dashboards and layers of interpretation can obscure what people actually struggle with. Leaders should keep speaking directly with customers and empower small teams to act quickly on what they learn. Scale should improve execution, not distance companies from users. – Leah Wang, Karpo
2. Staying Agile Without Losing Focus
The tech market in the AI era is changing super fast—the cycles for product demands, work methods and tools, and customers’ needs and requirements have all become very short. The one thing companies must preserve is agility within the boundaries of their focus. It is easy to get lost and try to achieve everything, only to end up with nothing. Being able to stay agile while knowing the problem your company solves is critical. – Yoav Amitai, Elsight
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3. Seeking Customer Feedback Early
Startups are great at prototyping new products and services and moving on quickly from ideas during the research and development phase. As companies scale, this “create fast, test fast, decide fast” capacity is often diminished. One way to keep it alive is to engage early with a customer or partner to confirm requirements or do testing. It puts healthy pressure on the development process while gathering valuable external feedback on pricing, functionality and positioning. – Eva Rudin, Thales Cybersecurity
4. Challenging Established Assumptions
Preserve the willingness to challenge assumptions. Startups move quickly because they don’t treat “this is how it’s done” as an acceptable answer. As companies scale, process can quietly replace curiosity. The best teams keep questioning their own products, decisions and assumptions, especially when something appears to be working. Scale should give you more resources to challenge the status quo, not more reasons to protect it. – Alissa Knight, Assail, Inc.
5. Rejecting Business That Doesn’t Fit
Keep saying no to the wrong business. When you are small, you cannot serve everyone, so you get good at turning down the wrong customers and use cases, and that focus is half of why you survive. At scale, every deal looks worth taking, and the muscle for walking away weakens. You must protect it on purpose. The companies that keep rejecting what does not fit stay sharp long after they could afford to lose focus. – Vytautas Savickas, Oxylabs
6. Letting Those Closest To Problems Decide
Solve problems close to where they occur. As organizations scale, issues often get escalated to the most senior person rather than the person best connected to the customer or the detail of the issue. That introduces delays to fixes being made and promotes permission-seeking rather than judgment and accountability. Push authority down and let the people closest to the problem make the call. – Rob Sloan, Zscaler
7. Deciding Quickly What To Stop
Knowing when to stop is crucial. Startups have to focus because their resources are limited. The ability in a startup to know exactly what is going on means not only decisions to invest but also decisions to divest are made faster. – Véronique Özkaya, DATAmundi
8. Making AI The Starting Point
AI-first thinking is the biggest thing established players need to adopt from the startup realm. New ventures have the luxury of AI being the starting point, not something they need to bolt onto old, outdated processes. That blank slate is a real edge—no legacy systems standing between them and AI-driven gains. So, I’d begin every problem by asking where AI can make the biggest impact and build from there. That mindset will define the future enterprise. – Tarek Nseir, Valliance
9. Testing Ideas Before Debating Them
Preserve the habit of testing before debating. Startups rarely have enough data to eliminate uncertainty, so they build something small, put it in front of users, and learn. At scale, debate can become a substitute for discovery. Established companies should relearn how to turn unanswered questions into fast, low-risk experiments, using evidence from the market to resolve what meetings cannot. – Melissa King, Paylocity
10. Giving Teams Room To Experiment
Let the people closest to a problem try things without asking permission first. In many cases, our team members have made our most impactful suggestions. We discussed it, tried it out and looked at the results together. Nobody wrote a proposal. Give teams a sandbox, clear data and security rules, and a few weeks to test. You’ll learn more than you would from a six-month planning cycle. – Merav Yuravlivker, Data Society
11. Flattening Communication Channels
Keep communication lines efficient. The best startups have an uncanny ability to throw unnecessary hierarchy to the wind and flatten communication lines. That’s how startups home in on solutions rather than simply admiring the problem. – James Stanger, CompTIA
12. Encouraging Cross-Department Conversations
Cross-department talk is essential. In a startup, everyone can talk to everyone without wondering about politics and the org chart. You never know where the next good idea will come from—it often comes from an “unexpected part” of the org chart. If Joe from team X is afraid of talking to Mary from team Y just because they don’t have the same boss, the company’s capacity to innovate is severely impacted. – Stephane Donze, AODocs
13. Balancing Risk With Rapid Iteration
Startups move fast because they accept higher risk, while large organizations slow down to protect reputation, revenue and investors. As companies grow, they must consciously balance risk appetite to keep innovating. Teams should also keep the startup habit of “relentless iteration”—sharing early “sh***y first drafts,” as referenced by Brené Brown—for fast feedback instead of waiting for polish. – Mandy Andress, Elastic
14. Shipping Early And Learning From Users
Ship things that aren’t ready and learn from real users instead of extensive internal reviews. Process exists to prevent mistakes, but it also prevents speed and discovery. Talk directly to users without a layer of research, summaries or account managers in between. – Amy Gu, Dynamsoft
15. Preserving Team Rituals As You Grow
Create rituals early and maintain them throughout your growth. Startup life is hard. One of the things that inspires and preserves team alignment is the rituals created in early startup life that create an identity, a battle cry and a touchstone to the mission. As new employees join the company, these same rituals become part of their orientation, which helps encourage unity. – Amy Brown, Authenticx
16. Making Fast, Reversible Decisions
Preserve fast, reversible decision making. Let teams run small, bounded tests without routing every choice through layers of approval, then use the results to adjust quickly. Reserve heavyweight reviews for decisions that are costly or difficult to undo—not every experiment. – Nagesh Nama, xLM Continuous Intelligence
17. Sharing Business Context Across Teams
Share the full picture with everyone. In a startup, the whole team knows the revenue, the biggest customer problem, and what worries the founders most. As companies grow, that context gets held back at the top, and teams start working on tasks without knowing why they matter. People make better decisions when they know what the company is facing. – Asad Khan, TestMu AI
18. Limiting Work In Progress
Preserve the startup habit of a hard work-in-progress limit. Early teams cannot pursue 20 “top priorities,” so starting one thing means stopping another. At scale, portfolios expand faster than capacity, and coordination becomes the bottleneck. Force every new priority to displace an old one. Speed comes as much from limiting concurrency as from moving faster. – Akhilesh Sharma, A3Logics Inc.
19. Running Processes Manually Before Automating
Do it by hand before automating it. Startups run a new process manually for a few weeks and learn where it actually breaks. Larger companies jump straight to automation and lock in their guesses. In mature organizations we audit, roughly a third of flows either duplicate another or barely run. A month of manual work first is cheaper than a year of maintaining the wrong automation. – Sergii Grushai, Peeklogic