You’ve built something that works.

You’ve got a team, real customers, and reliable revenue.

Now comes the hard part: figuring out how to keep growing without losing what made the business work in the first place.

If your company has been around for a while and has between 50-200 people, you’re no longer in startup territory, but you’re not yet a large, structured enterprise either. You’re in that in-between stage where complexity starts to surface. Product lines expand. Teams specialize. Growth becomes bumpier, and what used to work doesn’t scale the same way anymore.

This is where strategy begins to matter more than ever. Not just a bold vision or a good idea, but a shared, practical strategy that keeps your team aligned as the business gets more layered. Getting this right can unlock your next phase of growth. Getting it wrong can slow everything down or send you in too many directions at once.

Let’s take two companies as examples.

• Figma started with a focused strategy: real-time, collaborative design for product teams. They didn’t try to serve everyone. Instead, they carved out a wedge and executed against it with discipline. That clarity shaped their roadmap, engineering approach, and go-to-market motion. It gave them real momentum.
• Evernote, on the other hand, began with similar promise but gradually lost its way. As the business grew, it started expanding in all directions—food journaling, business card scanning, even branded socks. Instead of reinforcing their core, they distracted from it. What had been a focused experience became a fragmented one, and users drifted away.

Both companies started strong. The difference came down to focus versus sprawl.

If you’re leading a business at this scaling stage—past the scrappy beginnings but not yet at full operational maturity—you need frameworks designed for your level of complexity. Tools like the Business Model Canvas or Lean Startup methods are great when you’re still finding product-market fit. But once you’ve found it and are thinking about how to grow intentionally, you need a different toolkit.

Here are four frameworks I’ve found especially useful for companies in this stage. They’ll help you make smarter decisions, stay aligned, and build with purpose.

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1. Playing to Win

Best for: Making deliberate strategic choices as you grow

Originally developed by Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley, this framework helps companies move beyond vague mission statements by forcing real, consequential choices. It’s built around five questions:

• What is our winning aspiration?
• Where will we play?
• How will we win?
• What capabilities must be in place?
• What systems are needed to support those capabilities?

What makes this framework powerful is that it creates clarity through constraint. It helps leadership teams say no to distractions. Should we double down on one customer segment or expand into a new one? Should we compete on experience, price, or speed? Should we build or partner?

These choices ripple through every department. Playing to Win forces alignment at the top so that teams can execute in sync. It’s a foundational tool when you’re facing your next phase of growth and need the whole company rowing in the same direction.

2. The Three Horizons Model

Best for: Balancing short-term execution with long-term growth

The Three Horizons model helps you manage growth without losing sight of what keeps the business running today. It breaks your activities into:

• Horizon 1: Your current, core business
• Horizon 2: Emerging bets that could scale in the next 12 to 24 months
• Horizon 3: Long-term ideas and experiments

Mid-sized companies often fall into one of two traps: they either overcommit to the core and stop innovating, or they overinvest in speculative ideas before they’ve fully scaled what’s working. The Three Horizons model creates a structure for pacing growth investments while protecting operational focus.

This framework also helps you resist strategic sprawl. By categorizing initiatives by time horizon and maturity, you can place bets without disrupting the core or neglecting it. It helps you innovate without losing your footing.

3. The W Framework

Best for: Aligning leadership and creating a repeatable planning rhythm

Created by Lenny Rachitsky and Nels Gilbreth, the W Framework brings structure to how you define, align on, and communicate strategy over time. It gets its name from the shape of the process:

• Start by going wide: gathering input across the org
• Go deep with leadership: make tough decisions and shape the plan
• Go wide again: communicate clearly, get buy-in, and cascade

This framework shines at companies that have outgrown ad hoc planning and need a consistent, inclusive way to align leadership around what matters most. It helps make the strategy process visible, participatory, and repeatable.

More importantly, it builds buy-in. When your team feels part of the planning loop—not just handed a slide deck—they’re more likely to stay focused and own the outcomes. And that’s what scaling requires: strategic alignment that holds, even as you grow.

4. Blue Ocean Strategy

Best for: Finding your next market without chasing every opportunity

Developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy helps businesses move out of crowded, hyper-competitive markets (“red oceans”) and into uncontested spaces (“blue oceans”) where they can stand alone and create new demand.

It encourages you to stop fighting over the same customers and instead rethink how you deliver value. The core tools include:

• The Strategy Canvas, which maps how your value proposition compares across key attributes
• The Four Actions Framework:
  • Eliminate what customers no longer care about
  • Reduce what’s over-delivered
  • Raise what’s under-delivered
  • Create something new that competitors aren’t offering

For companies looking for their next lever, this framework forces bolder thinking. It helps you see beyond incremental improvements and imagine a different game altogether. Done well, it creates strategic clarity and real differentiation and avoids the trap of trying to be all things to all customers.

Bonus: Build Your Growth Formula

Best for: Making strategy measurable and aligned across the company

This one is a personal favorite. Coming from an engineering and analytical background, I love frameworks that can be broken down into inputs, understood with numbers, and improved over time. Your growth formula does exactly that.

Every business has one—even if you haven’t written it down yet. It might look like:

Revenue = Leads × Conversion Rate × Average Deal Size × Retention × Expansion

What matters is not the exact structure, but making the variables visible. Once you define your formula, you can use it as a decision-making tool. Where are we underperforming? What metric matters most right now? Are we solving for growth at the top of the funnel or retention at the bottom?

This model becomes a strategic compass. It helps teams focus on the inputs that actually move the needle, rather than chasing interesting ideas that don’t connect to outcomes. It also creates a shared language for product, marketing, sales, and finance to align around.

When you plug your strategic bets into this formula, it helps you figure out whether those bets will matter—and when.

Strategy Needs a Rhythm and Some Patience

These frameworks won’t give you all the answers. But they will give you a way to ask better questions, align your team, and avoid the common trap of trying to do too much at once.

That said, even the best frameworks fall flat without a regular rhythm. Strategy isn’t something you revisit once a year at an offsite and forget. The best companies come back to it regularly—quarterly or semi-annually—to test assumptions and adjust course when needed.

At the same time, don’t overcorrect too quickly. One of the fastest ways to lose trust inside a company is to change direction before anyone’s had time to make progress. A 50+ person company doesn’t pivot overnight. Strategic clarity needs time to cascade through the team, into roadmaps, and out into execution.

Find the balance. Revisit strategy often enough to stay responsive, but not so often that your team starts to say, “We’re always changing strategy.” Build in space for learning, but give your decisions time to stick.

In the next post, I’ll break down how to build a lightweight, repeatable operating cadence—one that reinforces your strategy without overwhelming your team.

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Migration Process

Transitioning to a new CMS can be a complex process. It involves careful planning and execution to ensure that all content is transferred smoothly without loss. Key steps include:

1. Backup Existing Content: Always start with a complete backup.
2. Choose the Right CMS: Select a platform that meets your needs.
3. Test the Migration: Run tests to ensure everything works as expected.

By following these steps, you can minimize disruptions during the migration process.

Emerging Trends

The landscape of CMS is constantly evolving. Some current trends include:

• Headless CMS: Separating the backend from the frontend for greater flexibility.
• AI Integration: Utilizing artificial intelligence to enhance user experience.
• Personalization: Tailoring content to individual user preferences.

Staying updated with these trends can help you leverage the full potential of your CMS.