The Org Chart Was 90% Empty
An external COO, five months into the role, had a board presentation in three weeks and a Google Doc with a title and nothing else. The CEO was asking every Monday. The clock was running.
Company type
B2B SaaS
Stage
Series A
Scope
90 people, scaling to 150
Time to output
4 sessions · under 2 weeks
4
Strategy sessions
<2 weeks
From brief to board-ready
1
Shared workspace
Before
The strategic problem
She was hired specifically to build the operational infrastructure for the next growth phase. Five months in, the company was at 90 people and the board expected a scaling plan at the next meeting. She had neither the plan nor a clear starting point.
The structure was breaking in plain sight. Too many people reporting to the CEO. VPs with ten direct reports each. Sales and Product barely talking. Every cross-functional decision landing back on the founder’s desk.
She had Googled every variation of the problem. Read three org design books. Asked two former colleagues what they did at their companies and got three completely different answers, none of which mapped to a 90-person B2B SaaS with a founder still in the weeds.
A traditional advisory engagement was not an option. She had three weeks, not three months. And the board had hired her to own this problem, which meant she could not distribute the work across the leadership team without signalling she was not capable of doing the job.
Process
Clarity
She opened a KONNECT project brief describing the situation: 90 people, flat structure collapsing, board deadline in three weeks. The AI mapped this across Business Strategy and Governance and Risk, with sub-domains in strategic planning, org design, and delegation of authority. It confirmed this was a structural architecture problem, not a people problem.
Ideation
The AI produced a gap map of the current structure. Three layers of decision-making were missing. No defined boundary between what the CEO owned and what the VP layer should own. A hiring sequence that would create structural dependency failures if roles were filled in the wrong order. It generated a first-draft three-layer framework with role-level rationale for each new position.
Validation
KONNECT matched her with a senior org design human expert who had structured three B2B SaaS companies through Series A to B transitions at the 80 to 180 headcount range. The expert kept two of the AI’s three structural recommendations, challenged one, and flagged a risk the AI had missed: the proposed VP of Customer Success was scoped for 150 people, not 90. Hiring to the future state prematurely would create a leadership vacuum in the present.
Co-Creation
Four sessions across ten days. The COO and the matched expert built the full org design plan together inside the KONNECT workspace. Every decision, rationale, and revision was archived automatically. Nothing had to be reconstructed between sessions.
Output
What was produced
- Three-layer org structure with defined management spans, VP-level remits, and a phased implementation sequence for moving from the current flat structure without disrupting live operations.
- Decision rights framework mapping which decisions move to the new VP layer, which stay with the CEO, and what the escalation logic looks like at each boundary.
- Hiring sequence with dependency logic showing which roles had to be filled before others to avoid structural failures mid-scale, with a risk flag on each of the first ten hires.
- VP of Customer Success phasing proposal replacing the original immediate hire with a two-stage approach matched to the company’s current operational readiness, not its future ambition.
- Board-ready narrative framing the org design as a business decision with a clear rationale underneath it, not just a chart submitted for approval.
What it enabled
- The board presentation landed. The hiring budget was approved.
- The two operationally experienced board members who pushed hardest on execution sequencing got specific answers in the room, not follow-up emails.
- The org chart was no longer 90% empty.
“She walked into that board meeting with a plan that had a logic underneath it, not just boxes and lines. The expert challenge on the VP of CS hire alone saved the company from a structurally premature decision that would have taken six months to unwind.”
The KONNECT difference
Traditional route
3–6 months and a full advisory engagement, with fees to match.
With KONNECT
~4 sessions, ~2 weeks, one workspace, expert-validated output.
KONNECT compressed what would have taken months into ten days without sacrificing the quality of the expert input. The AI built the diagnostic foundation. The human expert made the judgment calls the AI could not.
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