NCT for Scale-Ups
You've outgrown the founder's whiteboard but you're not ready for enterprise process. NCT gives growing teams alignment without the bureaucracy that slows you down.
Sound familiar?
The problems NCT was built to fix
Problem 1
What worked at 15 people is breaking at 50
The founder used to explain the strategy in standup. Now there are three teams, two time zones, and a Slack channel nobody reads. Alignment that used to happen by osmosis now requires structure — but the wrong structure kills your speed.
Problem 2
Teams are optimizing locally and missing the bigger picture
Engineering is shipping fast. Marketing is running campaigns. Sales is closing deals. But nobody is asking whether all three are pointing in the same direction. Each team has their own goals, but the company doesn't have a shared strategy.
Problem 3
Planning takes longer every quarter and delivers less clarity
You added a planning process because you needed one. Now it takes three weeks, involves 12 meetings, and produces a doc that's outdated by week four. The process is supposed to create alignment, but it's creating frustration instead.
How it works
Three layers — built for scale-ups
Every layer of NCT maps directly to how scale-ups already think about their work.
Write 3–5 Narratives that the whole company can rally around. Each team then writes Commitments that ladder up to the shared Narratives — alignment without top-down micromanagement.
Each team commits to specific outcomes that serve the company Narratives. Engineering commits to features, marketing commits to campaigns, sales commits to pipeline — all connected to the same strategic story.
Your existing project management — Jira, Linear, Asana — now connected to the strategic hierarchy. Every IC can trace their work back to a company Narrative in two clicks.
Real example
A Narrative for scale-ups
"Our best customers are asking for features that would let them roll out the product to their entire org — not just the team that adopted us. But our current plan structure, permissions, and billing don't support org-wide deployment. We're leaving expansion revenue on the table because our product was built for teams, not companies."
Commitments for this Narrative:
- 1Launch an organization-level plan with centralized billing and user management
- 2Build team-level permissions so admins can control access across departments
- 3Ship a self-serve upgrade flow so existing teams can expand without talking to sales
Use cases
How scale-ups use NCT
Cross-team alignment
Shared Narratives mean engineering, product, marketing, and sales are all working toward the same strategic bets. No more quarterly surprises when teams reveal they've been building different things.
New team onboarding
When you spin up a new team or hire a new lead, the Narratives are the onboarding doc. They explain what matters, why, and what's already been committed.
Board and leadership reporting
Narratives and Commitment health scores become your executive dashboard. Instead of cherry-picked metrics, leadership sees strategic progress across the company.
Managing competing priorities
When a new request comes in, the answer is simple: does it serve an active Narrative? If yes, scope it as a Commitment. If not, it waits for next cycle.
“We went from 'everyone is busy but nothing is connected' to every team knowing exactly how their work serves the company strategy.”
— VP of Product, Series B, 80-person company
See NCT in action
Example NCTs for scale-ups
Overhauling Quarterly Planning
Replace a slow, document-heavy planning process with a streamlined cycle using NCT structure.
Product & EngineeringLaunching Self-Serve Team Onboarding
Enable teams to onboard without sales involvement by building a self-serve setup experience.
Product & EngineeringUnifying the Design System
Consolidate three divergent UI libraries into one design system to speed up development and improve consistency.
NCT works across the whole company
Startups →
You don't need a planning department
Enterprise →
Replace your OKR spreadsheets with a framework that actually connects strategy to execution. NCT gives large organizations the structure they need without the bureaucracy they're trying to escape.
Remote Teams →
When you can't align in the hallway, you need alignment in the system. NCT gives distributed teams a shared strategic context that works across time zones
Founders →
Stop being the single point of failure for strategic context. NCT helps founders get the strategy out of their head and into a system that the whole team can execute on.
Also works for
Product →
Stop explaining your roadmap in slides. Let your Narratives speak for themselves
Engineering →
Give your engineers the 'why' behind every ticket. Less context-switching, better decisions, and a direct line from the code they write to the strategy it serves.
Marketing →
Connect your campaigns to the customer problems they solve
Sales →
Stop tracking activity, start tracking intent. NCT gives sales teams a framework for connecting territory strategy to the actual deals and conversations that close business.
Ready to run NCT with your scale-ups?
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