Pre-PMF
Before a repeatable sales motion exists. The founder is still testing who the buyer is and what they will pay for, so there is often not yet a system stable enough for the diagnostic to read.
Read the stage →Who we helpGrowth stages
Five stages, five different constraints.
The system that produced results at one growth stage becomes the constraint at the next. The dysfunction families stay the same, but which one carries the load changes as the company grows.
By growth stage
Pick the one closest to where you are.
Five organisational contexts. The constraint moves as the company grows; each page reads which one is carrying the load.
Early Growth
A repeatable motion exists, but it lives in the founder rather than in a system anyone else can run. The founder is usually still the best seller, and the cost is everything that does not happen because of that.
Read the stage →Scale-up
A single founder-led motion has to split into roles that can be repeated by people who did not invent it. What a small team handled through direct conversation does not survive role separation automatically.
Read the stage →Expansion
A working commercial motion gets multiplied across new territories, segments or teams, and the operating model that carried the first one has to travel with it, not just the people.
Read the stage →Enterprise
The system is mature and the dysfunction is expensive precisely because it is stable. Nobody is in crisis, which is why the loss compounds quietly for years before anyone prices it.
Read the stage →Why a working system stops working
The load changes faster than what carries it.
Each stage is held together by a different mechanism. A transition is the handover between two of them, and the gap in that handover is where the strain shows up.
- Pre-PMF
- Early growth
- Scale-up
- Expansion
- Enterprise
Across all of it
Stage changes the surface, not the method.
The six dysfunction families and the six financial-consequence components do not change between an early-stage team and an enterprise one. What changes is which family carries the load and how it disguises itself, which is why the stage alone cannot answer it in advance.
- KKey breakLocate
- IInputsEvidence
- HHidden costConsequence
- OOrderSequence
- NNamed ownersTransfer
Honest fit
Where the stage lens does not help.
Growth stage explains which constraint is likely to be carrying the load. It does not decide whether a diagnosis can be defended.
Before a repeatable motion
Without repeated evidence there is no pattern to separate from an experiment, so Build fits before measurement.
Without evidence access
Interviews, operating data and financial records decide what a finding can claim. Without them, nothing holds.
Without authority to change
A sequenced roadmap needs someone able to change roles, handoffs and ownership behind it.
Not sure? Test the fit in one call →
Where to go next
Three ways to keep going.
See it by sector instead
Five sectors, five different disguises, whatever stage you sit at.
Compare industries →See what gets measured
The six families, the signals that reveal them and how each one turns into cost.
Explore the Diagnosis →Find out where you sit
Ten questions, two minutes. A first read on which part of your system is carrying the most strain.
Take the Strain Check → FAQ
Growth stages FAQs.
How do you know which growth stage we are actually in?
That is one of the things the diagnostic establishes rather than assumes. Self-reported stage and the stage a system actually behaves like are not always the same thing.
Does company size matter more than growth stage?
Growth stage matters more. A ten-person team and a much larger one can sit at the same stage if the same coordination pattern is breaking in both, and the diagnostic reads stage, not headcount.
We feel like we are between two stages, which page applies?
Read both. Transitions between stages are exactly where dysfunction tends to concentrate, since the system built for the last one has not yet been rebuilt for the next.
Can a company move backward a stage, not just forward?
The stages describe system complexity, not a one-way path. A restructuring, a market shift or new leadership can put an established company back into patterns that read closer to an earlier stage.
Get started
The stage tells you where to look. It does not tell you what it costs.
Use 30 minutes to define the operating question, test what evidence exists and decide whether Kihon has a role at all. No scope is proposed before that is clear.
Discuss the operating problem