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What actually breaks when you grow past fifty people

Treeline Team

Abstract green gradient placeholder

Placeholder copy. The failure isn't usually the tooling. It's that nobody owns the boring parts, and the boring parts are what auditors ask about.

Placeholder copy written to give the layout realistic shape. At around fifty people, most companies find the informal systems that carried them this far have quietly stopped working.

Nobody owns onboarding

Accounts get created by whoever is nearest. Access is granted generously because revoking it later is somebody else's problem. Six months on, a departed contractor still has a live login and nobody can say who approved it.

The three things that fail first

  • Offboarding, because it has no deadline and no complaining customer
  • Device inventory, because laptops arrive faster than anyone records them
  • Access review, because it requires saying no to colleagues

None of these need a large team. They need someone whose actual job it is, which is a different problem from needing more headcount.

Every incident review traces back to a process nobody was assigned, not a control nobody bought.