Designing Processes That Scale Without Friction

When I joined Butternut AI, the company was experiencing rapid growth, both in terms of its product adoption and its internal team size. While this was an exciting milestone, it came with operational turbulence.

The Challenge

The Engineering, Product, and Customer Success teams were each performing well within their own domains, but collectively the work wasn’t flowing in sync. Deadlines were missed not because of lack of skill or effort, but because dependencies surfaced too late in the cycle. Forecasts for delivery often looked good at the start of a quarter but had to be revised mid-cycle. Teams were working incredibly hard, but without a clear, connected system in place, the pace felt reactive rather than strategic.

The problem wasn’t one of capability, it was about creating scalable systems that allowed the company to keep pace with growth without increasing friction.

What We Found

A Value Stream Mapping (VSM) exercise was initiated across three representative projects, rather than assuming the problems. The goal was to trace the full lifecycle of work, from planning to release, and observe where delays or inefficiencies emerged.

This exercise revealed three critical insights:

• Async Coordination Gaps – Teams spread across multiple time zones were relying on ad-hoc updates, which meant that progress and blockers weren’t consistently visible. Small delays compounded because they weren’t surfaced or addressed in time.
• Misaligned Cadences – Product roadmaps, engineering sprints, and customer success readiness plans were operating on different cycles. This misalignment meant that teams often weren’t ready to support each other at the right moments, leading to last-minute shifts in plans.
• Opaque Reporting – Information about project health was buried in separate tools used by each department. Without a single, shared version of truth, leadership lacked the visibility needed for proactive adjustments.

These findings confirmed what the teams already felt: the work was good, but the system wasn’t set up to support smooth delivery at scale.

Implementation and Transformation

Rather than introducing sweeping changes across all teams immediately, the right choice seemed to introduce a co-creation and pilot approach to ensure the solution was grounded in real team needs and not just theoretical best practices.

We selected a pilot group that included representatives from Engineering, Product, and Customer Success who were actively working on a cross-functional project. In a series of Co-Design Sprints, we walked through:

• Where delays happened in real time and how that impacted each function.
• What each team needed visibility on to better anticipate dependencies.
• What information or metrics mattered most for planning accuracy.

This process allowed us to design a minimum viable process framework informed directly by the people who would be using it, increasing both buy-in and relevance.

Once we had an MVP framework, we rolled it out in three carefully sequenced layers, each designed to address a core problem identified in the VSM exercise.

1. Async-Friendly Updates: We replaced scattered, ad-hoc updates with a standardized weekly async status update shared in one central channel accessible to all stakeholders. Updates followed a clear format covering progress, blockers and next steps, so that anyone reading could quickly identify the current state and what needed attention.
2. Aligned Cadences: We restructured planning to ensure that product roadmaps aligned with engineering sprints and customer success readiness milestones. This meant introducing quarterly alignment sessions to agree on strategic priorities and bi-weekly cross-functional check-ins to address active dependencies before they became bottlenecks.
3. Transparent Dashboards: We built real-time operational dashboards that consolidated key metrics such as delivery velocity, dependency risks, and forecast confidence levels. These dashboards became the single source of facts for leadership and team members, reducing the need for repeated status requests and enabling proactive decision making.

The Results

• Forecasting Accuracy Improved by 20%: Teams could now make realistic commitments and meet them because dependencies were visible earlier in the process.
• Delivery Friction Significantly Reduced: Blockers were identified and addressed before they became major delays, reducing the need for last-minute escalations.
• Team Delivery Confidence Increased: Internal team surveys reflected greater trust in timelines and a stronger sense of control over delivery cycles.

The reason this solution worked:

• The solution was built with the teams, which meant it directly addressed their real-world challenges.
• The pilot-first approach allowed us to refine the process before scaling, avoiding resistance from broader teams.
• The dashboards and cadences created transparency and alignment, which replaced reactive firefighting with predictable delivery rhythms.

Reflection

This initiative reinforced my belief that operational excellence is about creating systems that work for the people in them, not against them.

By taking the time to map value streams, co-create solutions, and test them in real conditions, we were able to build processes that scaled with the company’s growth without adding unnecessary friction. In a fast-paced, distributed startup environment, this shift from reactive problem-solving to proactive systems design was key to sustaining high performance at scale.