ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT David Lotfesness and Alexander Grosse know a thing or two about hypergrowth. You might say they wrote the book on it. Between them, they’ve held engineering leadership roles at Twitter, SoundCloud, Amazon/A9, issuu and Nokia — in many cases, during periods when hot products demanded that those companies stretch in new ways, and fast. Now Grosse, Director of Engineering for BCG Digital Ventures, and Lotfesness, the Head of Platform at eero, have lived through both the brilliant and bleak moments of scaling teams. Throughout their careers, they’ve noted one problem that can be particularly damaging to a fast-growing company: factions. Because if you’re going to launch the proverbial rocket ship, you need everyone focused on the same destination—not wrestling over the controls. In this exclusive interview, Lotfesness and Grosse look at ifve areas where startups can either take action to deactivate destructive factionalism or even prevent them from forming in the ifrst place. They share concrete processes for regaining the eiffciency that leaders might not even realize they’re losing to competing mindsets and poor communication. Through these tactics, they show through speciifc scenarios why empathy is just as vital to a startup’s success as innovation. 80