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When you're stuck—when you're agonizing over a decision, or when it feels like there’s no obvious answer—I have a simple tool I use with founders and operators inside Glue Club: 10x the problem.
What do I mean by that? Whatever decision you're weighing, whatever process you're designing, whatever person you're evaluating—imagine it 10 times bigger.
10x the number of customers.
10x the number of employees.
10x the amount of data, spend, or chaos.
Force yourself to ask: Would this still work? Would this person still scale? Would this solution even survive?
If your users, customers, or revenue are doubling every six months, you don't get the luxury of designing for today. You have to design for a company twice—or ten times—the size you are now.
Of course, you should ultimately factor in your company’s growth rate. If your company and business are not growing that fast, you might not need to design for scale. It can create a lot of problems to implement solutions or hire leaders who are too far ahead of your actual growth rate and business size. But if your graphs are going up and to the right at any meaningful speed, 10xing becomes an invaluable tool. Your current growth trajectory isn't just a backdrop. It's the single biggest input into how you should be solving problems.
Here’s why 10xing the problem helps: it cuts through the false comfort of assuming things will stay the same. When you force yourself to imagine a 10x bigger version of the issue, the answer often gets brutally clear.
Here’s an example.
Imagine you’re evaluating whether a leader on your team can scale. It's tempting to ask whether they can handle today's challenges—whether they can step up enough to manage the next six months. Our brains are naturally iterative when we evaluate people—but that's the wrong frame, especially if you’re scaling fast.
Instead, 10x the problem: ask yourself whether they could successfully lead the function if the team, customer base, or revenue grew by 10x. Once you do that, the answer usually becomes obvious. (Sometimes even 2x makes the cracks or the solution visible, but 10x leaves no doubt.)
You're probably overdue to act if you wouldn’t bet on them at that scale.
One of my favorite real-world examples comes from Claire Hughes Johnson during her time at Stripe. At around 500 employees—a moment when most companies would still be duct-taping systems together—she pushed Stripe to invest in Workday, an HR platform typically reserved for companies with 1,000+ employees. Why? Because she could see where Stripe was headed. She knew they'd be 5,000 people before long and wanted to avoid the pain of ripping out and replacing multiple systems during hypergrowth. She 10xed the problem—and made a decision that saved years of thrash down the line.
One of the fundamental challenges for leaders building a company for the first time is that they tend to over-focus on solving for the version of the company that exists today. One of the reasons I advocate hiring guides like Claire when you start to scale a company is that they know what is around the corner much more intuitively. As a Guide, Claire made that Workday decision because she had seen the challenges of scale at Google and the pressure that placed on various systems.
If it is your first time scaling, it is easy to operate without thinking about what the world will look like in six to twelve months. It’s common to make safe choices that feel easier now but create bigger, hairier problems later.
Scaling demands that you solve for who you're becoming, not who you are today.
So 10x the problem. See what it tells you.