14 Comments
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Karen Spinner's avatar

Love that you have a Chaos Checklist!

Nitin Sharma's avatar

Really appreciate this breakdown, Katie.

It’s crazy how many teams think they’re “busy” when in reality they’re just operating inside broken systems. The moment you fix visibility and handoffs, people stop firefighting and start building again.

Katie Barnes's avatar

🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼

Sharyph's avatar

It's a really different muscle set to go from building/selling the product to building/maintaining the system around the product. It sounds like you brought the necessary operational maturity to the table when they needed it most.

Melanie Goodman's avatar

Love this Katie! really vivid — you’ve captured the silent chaos that creeps into scaling teams when systems pull in different directions.

Katie Barnes's avatar

Thanks, @Melanie Goodman really appreciate you reading!

Chris Tottman's avatar

The "bellyflop" - ouch ! All going so well & then SMACK ...

John Brewton's avatar

Growth without structure always borrows against trust.

Cris Cafiero's avatar

Love that I'm just finding this! I wrote an article about breaking points for startups that aligns with this pretty well:

https://criscafiero.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-startups-outgrow

Seth Waite's avatar

This is a yo-yo cycle that happens again and again for founders. I've been there 🙋🏻‍♂️

Dennis Berry's avatar

Loving the Chaos Checklist... We can ALL use that!

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Nov 12, 2025
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Katie Barnes's avatar

😂😂 well I appreciate you following along anyway!!