What scales when headcount doubles 

Most IT teams can point to the exact week they realized the old model was gone.

It's rarely a disaster, but usually something small that triggers an issue. Examples include:

• A new hire starts, and no one knows who owns account provisioning, because the person responsible is now on a different team.
• A sales lead asks that a security questionnaire be turned around immediately, yet the evidence required to complete the form is unavailable.
• An employee in another region requires a new laptop, but the answer to "how do we do that?" is "we've never done that before."

When the headcount is 80 employees, IT support is one person. At 400 employees, IT has to be a system if it’s to successfully support the organization.

The uncomfortable part is that nobody schedules organizational transitions – they happen while IT is busy.

That is what this presentation covers.

What breaks as IT scales

As companies grow, IT must solve more than just technology issues.

• Ticket volume climbs
• Identity and access are harder to manage
• Compliance requirements become more complex
• Documentation falls behind
• Device operations become logistical problems

As the organization grows with more employees and across more regions, IT is often hiring and building its own team, shifting the role from simply “resolving issues” to designing how employees get their work done. And that's where hypergrowth exposes a common problem: what breaks first is whatever was held together by one person's judgment and memory.

That's a useful diagnostic, because it's testable right now. Walk through your operation and mark every step where the honest answer to "how does this happen?" is a person.

Those are the failure points.

Not the systems you're worried about, but the ones you've never had to worry about, because someone quietly handled them.

There's a second pattern worth naming: every category of IT tooling automates the well-defined middle of a process and leaves the edges alone. Zero-touch is the cleanest example: enrollment and configuration are solved, and most Mac admins have solved this well.

But device must still be:

• Forecasted and sourced
• Stored
• Shipped and tracked
• Retrieved
• Retired

And none of that touches the MDM. The same shape appears in identity, support and compliance as growth exposes those edges.

Since it can't all be fixed at once, the skill becomes deciding what:

• Gets a system
• Gets a partner
• Stays manual

Who you'll hear from

Joe Hurshman runs security and IT at Teamworks: the operations platform used across collegiate and professional sports. He built device operations at Found and at Apple before that, and has experienced company scalability across three different stages:

• Inventing processes
• Outgrowing them
• Operational maintenance

Hurshman talks about what he built systems for, what he handed off, what he left alone, and which of those calls he'd make differently, alongside:

• How to tell which parts of the operation to systematize first, when everything is loud
• Where automation delivered real leverage, and where it just moved the work
• Keeping day one consistent for a new hire in one country and a new hire in another
• Scaling without falling behind on security and compliance
• What held up under pressure and what quietly fell over

The back half of the presentation is open to questions from attendees. Share the version of this you're working with, as specific real-world problems are usually better than scripted scenarios.