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Relayr: What If An ‘Agile’ Mindset Doesn’t Scale? Posted on : Mar 30 - 2021

Digital startups are very often built around an ‘agile’ and flexible mindset, with a strong focus on ideas and little regard for traditional ‘top-down’ management. Scaling into a successful and stable enterprise, however, often requires a different approach – one that balances nimbleness with structure. 

I spoke with Guneet Bedi, Senior Vice President (SVP) and General Manager at relayr, about transitioning from a small, bustling company into a business that can reliably scale, and why company culture has to change along the way.

Three stages of growth

For Bedi, any digital transformation strategy has to go hand in hand with cultural change, and that doesn’t always mean sticking to an agile, start-up mentality. Relayr provides digital transformation services in the industrial IoT space, and has undergone a change process that followed a distinct path from a venture-backed start-up in 2015 through to being acquired by a traditional insurance company in October 2018. As such Bedi and the relayr Executive Leadership team have thought a lot about how digital transformation manifests in a company’s culture, concluding that “digital maturity really dictates where change is needed - a lot of companies are just dabbling with technology, others are starting to implement, and fewer still have figured out the tech piece and are starting to scale.”

Central to Bedi’s evaluation of digital transformation programs are the cultural changes embodied at each distinct level of digital maturity - ideation, implementation, and scaling up. “In the first stage when you’re first starting to do market creation and value capture, the goals are very customer-driven. Building confidence is key because market perception is so important,” says Bedi. At this “very early” stage, top-down decision making with a broad/experimental approach was necessary for relayr, but Bedi feels that a company should also remain very open to new ideas and celebrate every ‘micro-goal’ milestone: “To start with, trust in people, not process. It’s okay to fail, it’s okay to not have all the information, it’s okay to be more nimble - all of that is very important to start with,” says Bedi.

Balancing act

Relayr is now “right in the middle” of the second ‘implementation’ stage “where you need to balance that nimbleness with structure,” says Bedi, “this is where the cultural shift really starts to happen - it’s not enough to be top-down and customer-facing, every department has to be part of that change process.” Looking at their ‘stage one’ attitude, to “throw people at the problem, to get customer success whatever the cost,” Bedi and the relayr team realized that their agile mindset had “led to different strategies in different teams” and that they were at risk of having “too many cooks in the kitchen,” which led to some unforeseen challenges. “In some cases we had too many layers of people between a customer request and the engineering department,” says Bedi, “why couldn’t that be flattened to 1-2 layers?” View More