Julia Barham's coaching mantra: when a leader remains the single person making every trade-off and priority call as the team grows, they "scale chaos" instead of scaling the product — the org's ability to function is capped by how many rooms one person can be in.
Fix: replace personal judgment calls with durable, accessible artifacts — written decision criteria, SLAs or bug-severity rubrics for triage, and self-service dashboards so people can answer customer/business questions without going through the leader.
Quote: "You have to be the person that's making the call on the trade-off or the priority. You're scaling chaos."
Related: Well-Run vs. Successful: The Hypergrowth Chaos Threshold, Escalation to Shared Authority, Four Slices of the Pie (Product Portfolio Balance) (sibling mistake in Barham's four-mistakes framework).
One concrete mechanism Barham gives for getting out of the bottleneck seat: SLAs or bug-severity rubrics for incoming tickets and defects. Defining severity tiers and response-time targets up front lets any team member triage consistently as volume grows, instead of routing every prioritization call through the leader personally.