This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/why-your-product-is-scaling-faster-than-your-story-can-handle.
When product scale outpaces narrative clarity, teams accumulate narrative debt. A systems view of why growth quietly breaks alignment first.
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When a company scales, the product's narrative (its purpose, story and meaning) often lags behind its technical growth, creating narrative debt. This debt, like technical debt, compounds silently, leading to misalignment, inefficiency and increased friction across teams. The story becomes fragmented, causing onboarding bloat, unclear messaging and costly decision-making. To scale effectively, treat the narrative as critical infrastructure. A coordination layer that aligns people and teams. Diagnose narrative debt by testing if new hires, departments, and roadmaps align with the core story. Fix it by proactively tightening narrative architecture, ensuring the story scales alongside the product to maintain organizational momentum and meaning.