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But there’s no way the SmartThings or RocketPower of today—with hundreds of global employees and products in millions of homes—could run that way. What works when you’re a team of 12 starts to break when you’re at 120. Processes that used to feel fast become fragile. And the business begins to depend on a handful of people whose departure would cause everything to grind to a halt.

A Fragile State

This story is more common than you’d expect, and it usually shows up in subtle ways:

• Onboarding takes weeks, not days

• One or two “key” people are constantly being pulled into every decision

• There’s no single source of truth—just a mix of Slack threads, Notion pages, and oral tradition

• New hires can’t get up to speed without constant hand-holding

This is what we call tribal knowledge—critical operational know-how that lives in people’s heads instead of systems the company owns.

When a company is small, tribal knowledge feels efficient. But as you grow, it becomes a bottleneck—and a serious liability.

Does Your Company Face These Risks?

1. Lost time and momentum

According to Azure solution architect Keith Jenneke, it typically takes 3 to 6 months for a new developer to become productive in systems of moderate complexity—and up to 12 months in more advanced environments. 

This supports research by Coreteka which estimates the cost of onboarding a developer—excluding salary—at $28,000 to $35,000. 

If your internal processes aren’t documented, every new hire takes longer, costs more, and pulls valuable team members away from their own work just to bring someone else up to speed.

2. Team burnout

Your most capable team members—the ones you depend on—are constantly being interrupted to train, clarify, or explain things they’ve already explained. It slows them down. It drains morale. And over time, it increases turnover risk.

3. Lower company valuation

Key person dependency doesn’t just make you operationally fragile—it can make your company less valuable. According to business advisory firm William Buck, if your internal knowledge isn’t transferable, it can “significantly reduce your valuation—or make your company unsellable.” Forbes Business Council goes so far as to say, “Reliance on indispensable personnel can erode value or deter buyers entirely.”

What It Means to Have Institutional IP

When people hear “IP,” they often think patents. But the intellectual property of your institution—your internal systems, workflows, templates, and tooling—are just as critical.

Institutional IP is what allows your company to function and grow without having to reinvent the wheel every time you onboard, scale, or shift direction. This involves turning your company’s hidden knowledge into clear, ownable systems.

How to Put This Into Practice

Our approach is practical and people-first:

1. Shadow your experts – watch how the work actually gets done

2. Document the process – capture what’s in people’s heads

3. Design reusable systems – tools, templates, dashboards, or playbooks

4. Transfer ownership – so future team members can get started without starting from scratch

This isn’t about creating rigid bureaucracy. It’s about creating a foundation that frees your best people to focus on high-impact work—not re-explaining the same Slack thread three times a week.

The goal isn’t to replace your MVPs. It’s to support them—by building the systems that let them work smarter and more sustainably.

What You Get Back

• Faster onboarding: Ramp-up time drops from months to weeks when new hires don’t have to decode tribal knowledge.

• Refined processes—before you build: In many cases, simply observing workflows and asking the right questions leads to immediate improvements. At West Auctions, we helped streamline day-to-day operations before designing a single screen.

• Less time spent hand-holding: Senior staff are freed up to focus on strategic work instead of training or putting out fires.

• Higher enterprise value: Your business is no longer reliant on specific people to function. That’s attractive to investors, partners, and future leaders.

• Reusable onboarding materials: Documented workflows often double as training guides for future hires—creating value long before you launch new tooling.

Are You at an Inflection Point? 

If you’re experiencing these growth pains, congratulations! It means you’ve successfully outgrown your MVP. You may not need to scale by hiring more people—you can scale by codifying what your people already know.

When internal knowledge becomes institutional IP, your team gets stronger, your systems get smarter, and your company becomes more productive.

Need help?

At Mass Productive, we work alongside your team to document tribal knowledge, streamline workflows, and design tools that grow with your business. If you’d like help turning internal knowledge into systems that scale, let’s talk!