McKinsey 7S Example: A Company Outgrowing Its Structure
A company that quadrupled headcount in two years while keeping the systems and style of a 30-person startup.
This is the most common 7S pattern: strategy and staff changed rapidly, and structure, systems, and style did not change with them.
The output is not a description but a list of contradictions. Each one is a place where two elements are pulling against each other.
Shared Values
- Genuine, strongly held: 'ship it and fix it fast'
- Customer obsession is real and visible in daily decisions
- Increasingly at odds with enterprise buyers' need for stability
- New joiners absorb these within weeks — the culture transmits well
Strategy
- Move upmarket from SMB to enterprise over 18 months
- Explicit non-goal: no further SMB feature investment
- Understood by leadership; roughly half the company can state it accurately
- Requires capabilities the company does not currently have
Structure
- Still functional and flat, as designed for 30 people
- Spans of control now 12-18 in engineering
- No clear owner for the enterprise segment
- Handoffs between sales and delivery are undefined and cause friction
Systems
- Sales commission still rewards deal count, not deal size
- No enterprise-grade security review or procurement process
- Planning cycle is monthly; enterprise sales cycle is six months
- Contradiction: incentives reward exactly what the strategy abandons
Skills
- Strong: rapid product development and customer support
- Missing: enterprise sales, security compliance, solution architecture
- Nobody has run a procurement or security review before
- Legacy strength in high-volume, low-touch onboarding now less relevant
Style
- All significant decisions still route through two founders
- Now the primary bottleneck at this headcount
- Disagreement is safe and common — a genuine strength
- Bad news travels upward quickly, which is worth protecting
Staff
- 30 to 120 people in two years
- Median tenure under 11 months
- Turnover concentrated in support, where load rose without headcount
- No enterprise sales hires yet, despite the strategy requiring them
- Key-person dependency on two founders and one principal engineer
What this canvas reveals
- Strategy says 'move to enterprise', systems still reward volume of small deals. The incentive wins.
- Style is unchanged from the founding team's — every decision still routes through two founders, which at 120 people is now the primary bottleneck.
- Shared values are genuinely strong, which is the asset that makes the rest fixable. Fixing structure and systems is much easier than fixing culture.
Block by block
1Shared Values
- Genuine, strongly held: 'ship it and fix it fast'
- Customer obsession is real and visible in daily decisions
- Increasingly at odds with enterprise buyers' need for stability
- New joiners absorb these within weeks — the culture transmits well
2Strategy
- Move upmarket from SMB to enterprise over 18 months
- Explicit non-goal: no further SMB feature investment
- Understood by leadership; roughly half the company can state it accurately
- Requires capabilities the company does not currently have
3Structure
- Still functional and flat, as designed for 30 people
- Spans of control now 12-18 in engineering
- No clear owner for the enterprise segment
- Handoffs between sales and delivery are undefined and cause friction
4Systems
- Sales commission still rewards deal count, not deal size
- No enterprise-grade security review or procurement process
- Planning cycle is monthly; enterprise sales cycle is six months
- Contradiction: incentives reward exactly what the strategy abandons
5Skills
- Strong: rapid product development and customer support
- Missing: enterprise sales, security compliance, solution architecture
- Nobody has run a procurement or security review before
- Legacy strength in high-volume, low-touch onboarding now less relevant
6Style
- All significant decisions still route through two founders
- Now the primary bottleneck at this headcount
- Disagreement is safe and common — a genuine strength
- Bad news travels upward quickly, which is worth protecting
7Staff
- 30 to 120 people in two years
- Median tenure under 11 months
- Turnover concentrated in support, where load rose without headcount
- No enterprise sales hires yet, despite the strategy requiring them
- Key-person dependency on two founders and one principal engineer