The Hardest Part of Scaling Isn't the Market. It's the Org.
How Erik Huddleston builds systems that normalize change and make speed sustainable.
Brought to you by:
ExactTempo—The top 1% of leaders send consistent updates that empower their teams. ExactTempo makes it 10x easier, so you can too.
Sometimes it's the market. Sometimes it's the product. Sometimes it's the funding.
But more often than leaders admit, the fundamental constraint on growth is internal.
"The number one rate limiter to growth in a tech company is the organizational capacity for change."
That insight comes from Erik Huddleston, CEO of Aprimo, a category leader in content operations and marketing performance. Before Aprimo, he led six companies to acquisition, helped scale others through M&A, and held leadership roles at Sprinklr, TrendKite, and Cision. He's seen fast growth from every angle, and what happens when companies scale faster than their systems can keep up with.
Erik doesn't just talk about culture, communication, and cadence. He operationalizes them, turning values into velocity and weekly routines into organizational alignment.
This edition of Rhythms of Scale unpacks the system behind his success.
When Growth Accelerates, Culture Must Drive Adaptation
"As soon as you create momentum, everything changes—your problems, your systems, your assumptions. But humans are wired to resist change."
Most human institutions—families, schools, governments—evolve slowly. Companies, especially those in the tech sector, tend to grow rapidly. That speed creates dissonance: teams don't have time to adjust before the next change arrives.
Erik's view is that culture should absorb that pressure, not by softening it, but by making change feel routine.
That's not something you leave to chance. You design for it.
Culture That Enables Change
Erik uses five core behaviors to make fast change feel normal without introducing chaos.
1. Operational Excellence
You can't evaluate a strategy if you execute it poorly. Erik raises the quality bar not for its own sake, but because clarity depends on it. High quality enables faster learning.
2. Cycle Time and Urgency
Erik applies his supply chain background here by reducing batch size, eliminating wait time, and accelerating feedback loops.
"If your unit of value is small, you can test fast, get value fast, and layer gains daily. That compounds."
3. Psychological Safety through a Learning Culture
Erik views psychological safety not as a standalone trait, but as a product of a learning culture—one that normalizes experimentation and makes failure an integral part of the process.
"You want people in the operating room, not on the operating table."
When teams are encouraged to test, learn, and separate problems from people, they develop the confidence and urgency to move fast, even through uncertainty.
4. Intellectual Honesty
"You have to call balls and strikes."
In practice, this means surfacing problems as they happen, not spinning them. Teams can't fix what they won't acknowledge.
5. One-Team Mindset
When priorities shift, you need horizontal flexibility.
"If marketing's behind on lead gen, sales leans in."
This mindset enables people to respond cross-functionally to the business's current needs, rather than just their own function's responsibilities.
Together, these behaviors form a culture that not only aligns people but also prepares them to adapt.
Cadence as a Flywheel
Erik doesn't treat cadence as a reporting routine. He builds it as a mechanism to drive and reinforce change every week. The week starts with strategy flowing down and ends with feedback coming up.
His flywheel has three parts:
Strategy sets direction. Where is value being created? What must change to reach the next inflection point?
OKRs break it down. Goals cascade through go-to-market, product, and people engines. They're specific, measurable, and tied to strategic outcomes.
Weekly rhythm drives motion.
Monday AM: Executive team meets to make top-level decisions and clarify the week's priorities.
Monday PM: Senior leaders review OKRs, flag risks, and seek assistance in front of their peers.
Tuesday: Staff meetings cascade updates across the org—L1 to L3.
Wednesday to Friday: One-on-ones start to cascade bottom-up feedback through the organization, surfacing insights from the front lines.
Friday: Skip-level conversations supplement that flow, giving Erik another channel for a direct signal on how decisions are landing.
"By Friday afternoon, I usually know which of my decisions were dumb. And I can fix them on Monday."
This cadence isn't reactive. It's recursive. His rhythm creates a continuous signal. Strategy flows down. Feedback comes up. Adjustments happen fast.
Role Clarity Isn't Bureaucracy. It's Leverage.
One area Erik and I both emphasize—because it's so often neglected—is job descriptions.
In many companies, they're outdated or nonexistent. The result is confusion, conflict, and drift.
Erik treats them as dynamic artifacts. But not just lists of responsibilities—structured documents that define how a role contributes to value creation.
"A lot of confusion just comes from unclear ownership."
Each person's role is assessed through three lenses:
What activities create enterprise and customer value?
What internal dependencies rely on this role?
What can we measure to evaluate success?
From this, Erik builds scoreboards. Employees see what success looks like—and how they're trending toward it.
"People should be able to go home on Friday and know if they had a good week."
Clarity isn't just about accountability. It's about confidence.
Communication Is the Heartbeat of Execution
If cadence drives motion, communication keeps it coherent. Erik builds internal communication with the same level of design he applies to strategy.
The centerpiece: weekly, intentional communication.
"People say they want vision. What they really mean is strategy—and the story behind it."
Every week, Erik reinforces that story through multiple channels:
Leadership Meetings: Include not just execs but key leaders across the org. These are the people others turn to when they want to understand what's happening and why.
Skip Levels: Erik updates his skip-level roster quarterly, based on pressure points within the organization. These give him a signal from the ground and let others hear directly from him.
All-Hands: Held monthly or more often, depending on pace. Erik doesn't just present metrics—he connects them back to strategy, assumptions, and what's changed.
Async Channels: A structured Slack/Teams architecture supports localized communication. He also utilizes video updates and internal reporting to enhance visibility and minimize ambiguity.
This commitment to consistent communications is how leaders stay visible, strategy stays top of mind, and course corrections happen before misalignment compounds.
It's also precisely the kind of clarity and consistency we're enabling with ExactTempo—a platform that helps leadership teams operationalize communication, supporting speed, alignment, and trust.
Try This in Your Org This Week
Ensure your operating cadence supports your values. Where are speed, learning, and candor being reinforced? Which values are floating with no operational support?
Create a rhythm that works like a flywheel. Does your weekly operating cadence push strategy forward and surface problems fast?
Audit your job descriptions. Start with one role. Is it aligned to value creation? Does it have a scoreboard? Could the person in that seat tell you how they know they had a good week?
Closing Reflection
Growth breaks things. The question is whether you've built a system to respond fast enough when it does.
For Erik, culture isn't what you believe—it's what your systems reinforce.
Cadence isn't a calendar—it's how the organization breathes.
Communication isn't a broadcast—it's how momentum compounds.
If your team had to move faster tomorrow, could they?
Brought to you by:
ExactTempo—The top 1% of leaders send consistent updates that empower their teams. ExactTempo makes it 10x easier, so you can too.
