2025.11.26

Product vs. Scale: What working in agencies, startups, and corporates has taught me about real product focus

We’ve all heard about the move-fast-and-break-things culture of startup life, about the work-hard-play-hard ethos of agencies, and about the maturity and stability of corporate life. I’ve worked in all three. I ran my own agency, helped lead a start/scale-up, and now work in a global corporate in one of the most regulated industries: healthcare. And, while there is truth to the clichés about how things work, I’ve seen the biggest difference is in what energy gets spent on.

In this post, I’ll look at the difference between these three contexts, how scale demands its own focus, and how teams in larger companies can fight back to keep the customer (instead of the org) at the center of what they do.

Agency Life

I’ve spent a lot of time in agencies. I worked at a small advertising agency before moving to frog design before founding my own agency. At all three, the focus was clear. The process was simple. A client came with a problem, we aligned on scope, we put together a small team, and then we built. We delivered high-quality work faster than in-house teams. It’s easy to guess that agencies have access to better talent or refined processes, but the reality is often simply that they can focus. There are fewer politics, streamlined processes, and most meetings are focused on moving the work forward. Agencies are a magic solution because their operating model creates focus, resulting in aligned teams, tight feedback loops, and clear progress every day.

Startup Life

I’ve worked both at traditional startups as well as at a startup operating within a larger company, and, similar to the operations of an agency, startups create clear focus. It’s easier at first with a small team. There’s a lot at stake, and distractions aren’t a luxury shoestring budgets can afford. A startup won’t get funding if they can’t prove there’s demand for their product, and they can’t prove demand if they don’t build something customers want. When I worked at VanMoof, we structured our teams around the customer journey and tied success to real outcomes: bike sales, service performance, and the end-to-end product experience. There were imperfections, but we checked in every two weeks to see what was working and what wasn’t and to adjust course where necessary and possible. While agencies have focus thanks to their operating model, startups have it out of necessity.

Corporate Life

Then there’s corporate life, where the work shifts from building products to keeping the machine running. Across industries, I’ve seen that corporate focus is often on maintaining scale, with heavy administrative processes, budgeting battles, and countless rituals to ensure alignment. While corporate leadership touts customer value, innovation, and efficiency, the reality is that valuable time is lost to risk reduction, KPI completion, and internal visibility. You could argue that these ways of working are essential to keeping the company safely moving in the same direction, but at what cost? At the cost of focus that could be on customers and the products that serve them.

So what choices do corporate teams have? Outsource the most important initiatives to agencies while allowing their internal teams to drown in corporate process? Or lose to startups that have no choice but to put the customer at the center of everything they do?

Refocusing

There are ways we can fight back.

First, teams need clear leadership and direction, not hundreds of KPIs that have nothing to do with the things our customers care about. Microsoft rediscovered this under Satya Nadella. With a cultural reset and a few crisp, company-wide objectives, teams suddenly had air again. The organization shrank its alignment cost, designers and engineers felt heard, and Microsoft became relevant in a way it hadn’t been in years.

Second, keep teams small and focused. Amazon’s two-pizza approach works. If the team can’t be fed by two pizzas, it’s too big. Small teams don’t need dozens of alignment meetings and progress templates. They can make decisions in a single channel, empowering individuals to focus less on the communication of decisions and more on the execution of them.

Combine these together, and you get something akin to Spotify’s now-famous squad model: small teams with shared goals.

Lastly, don’t centralize innovation. When companies centralize innovation into a single team, they unintentionally create distance between the people who dream and the people who ship. The result is predictable: a pipeline full of concepts that never make it into customer hands. Here we can learn from Adobe’s transition to Creative Cloud. They didn’t isolate innovation; they put it directly in the hands of the product teams themselves. The teams closest to the customer owned the risk, the learning, and the outcome, and the entire company transformed as a result.

In summary, corporates don’t lose velocity as a consequence of size. They lose velocity because they scale communication, process, and alignment instead of scaling ownership, clarity, and decision-making. In the end, companies that win won’t be the ones with perfect processes. They’ll be the ones that organize their teams toward customer-relevant outcomes and protect their builders from everything that gets in the way.