The CTO’s Dilemma: Scaling Fast Without Breaking the Culture or the Code
Brian Singer
CTO
We’re proud to feature a new article from RSi’s Chief Technology Officer, Brian Singer. In this thought-provoking piece, Singer explores the tightrope technology leaders walk when balancing rapid growth with the need to protect both organizational culture and technical integrity.
Startups love to talk about moving fast — but speed can be a double-edged sword. As a CTO, one of the hardest balancing acts is scaling quickly without leaving behind a trail of technical debt and cultural drift.
Many of you have heard a similar story, ‘Early in our journey, we were shipping fast, hiring fast, growing fast. Everything was a sprint. It felt like we were building the rocket while already in orbit — and in a way, we were. But beneath the wins, cracks were forming: unstable codebases, stressed-out engineers, and team norms that were more accidental than intentional.’
This is the CTO’s dilemma: how do you sustain velocity without sacrificing the quality of your systems or the soul of your engineering team?
1. The Temptation to Go Fast — at All Costs
Speed is intoxicating, especially in high-growth environments. You want to beat competitors to market. You want to impress investors. You want to ride the momentum.
But moving fast often means:
- Cutting corners in architecture decisions.
- Skipping documentation and tests.
- Onboarding engineers before your culture or codebase is ready to support them.
- Burning out your team.
It’s like adding horsepower to a car without checking the brakes.
2. Culture and Code Are More Connected Than You Think
It’s easy to treat “tech” and “team” as separate workstreams — but they’re deeply intertwined. When codebases are chaotic, engineers disengage. When expectations are unclear, trust erodes. When deadlines are arbitrary, quality suffers.
Architecture is a cultural artifact. So are rituals like code reviews, sprint retros, and postmortems. The way we build reflects the way we work together.
3. Principles to Scale Thoughtfully
Mistakes are learning opportunities, and I have made my share. Through those trials, I have created some principles to follow when you are taking on new challenges.
Automate before you accelerate
Manual deploys, flaky tests, or handoffs between teams will bottleneck you eventually. Automate early — even if it feels slower at first.
Build for modularity
A tightly coupled monolith might be fast to build, but painful to scale. Even if you’re not going full microservices, clear boundaries between components are critical.
Hire for alignment, not just velocity
A brilliant engineer who doesn’t value collaboration or mentorship can be a net negative. Culture scales through people — not policies.
Prioritize clarity over speed
Clear product direction, clear technical ownership, and clear communication rhythms save 10x time later in the cycle.
As the CTO you are not alone on this journey. The above principles do not work in a vacuum. You must be a business partner and work collaboratively with your peers on the executive team to help educate them on the importance of the above principles. If not, you’ll come off as a leader more focused on yourself and not placing the organization first.
4. The Hard Lessons I Had to Learn
I once owned a tier one application which was built upon inherited architecture from a legacy application. The system was fragile with a critical service that had ballooned in size and function. The code was fraught with issues including memory leaks which caused frequent disruptions in service and the poorly written database interfaces led to frequent deadlocks.
Refactoring this system was a non-starter (or so I was told) and I bought into that point-of-view. That is until I had a catastrophic failure in the system that caused a high severity event leading to a 45-minute outage.
This was a moment of realization for me as a leader in that I needed to accept the reality of what I was accountable for and lead my team and organization into changing the culture surrounding refactoring and eliminating technical debt.
This experience has continued to influence how I digest information, eliminate emotion from the important data, evaluate possible solutions and make a decision that is best for the organization’s goals.
Closing Thoughts
Growth Is Not Just a Metric — It’s a Responsibility!
As a CTO, you’re not just scaling systems — you’re scaling trust, clarity, and confidence. That’s the real job. Anyone can move fast. It takes real leadership to grow without breaking the very foundation that made you successful in the first place.
I would love to hear from other tech leaders. How do you balance speed and sustainability in your teams?