You’ve just closed your Series A, meticulously planned your product roadmap, and presented revenue targets to your team. The next day, your head of engineering drops big news: instead of the anticipated 20% increase in her team's size, she needs to double her headcount to deliver on the product roadmap. She argues that in her experience, this is the norm for your ambitious plans. But it’s far from what you’d anticipated. How do you determine the best course of action?

You’ll likely turn to your Head of People and CFO for benchmarks on team growth and guidance on budget. Externally, seeking advice might lead you to an investor, a peer, or an advisor. If you’re lucky, you might connect with someone who’s been a part of high-growth at companies like Figma or Datadog. But precise details on headcount and timing are hard to pin down, and none of these playbooks fully align with your product or your company's stage. You consider using LinkedIn to reconstruct the growth patterns of comparable companies, but neither you nor your team has the time, and anyway that would only be a current snapshot. In the end, you're left with your gut.

Use TeamPlan to level up your org design

Stories like this play out repeatedly across the decade-plus it typically takes for a company to scale from idea to IPO. At the start of the journey, these questions will land at the founder’s door – 50% of their time will be spent on hiring and people management (a fact that many are surprised by). Later on, founders are working with Heads of People to make data-driven headcount decisions, and meeting with their CFO to account for additional staff in budget projections. High growth demands a constant recalibration of your team so it’s fit for purpose. Put simply, workforce planning is critical, hard and needs expertise.

TeamPlan provides the data necessary to make informed decisions about how to scale your team and leadership. A first-of-its-kind org design benchmarking tool, it gives you access to data from 210 leading tech companies including Figma, Airbnb, and Stripe, so scaling startups can take control of their team growth.

As a companion to our Scaling Through Chaos book, TeamPlan allows startup leaders to interrogate a data set of 200,000 career profiles from successful startups, offering a unique chance to peer into which roles were hired and when. For example how the composition of a go-to-market team at a SaaS startup evolved between 50 and 125 headcount.

With TeamPlan, you can filter companies by business model, location, team, function, and headcount so that you can benchmark your team’s growth at every stage. You can even zoom right in by selecting a small set of companies to see the growth journeys most like yours.

Use TeamPlan to:

Chart team growth

Determine how many people you will likely need to hire for each function (e.g. Product, Design, Marketing) across the company at each key growth stage.

Say you’re a US-based B2C App company – TeamPlan shows that the majority of your successful peers hired 15 engineers as they grew from 11-50, added 10 new sales hires from 51-125, and recruited 16 into the customer success team from 126-250.

Benchmark team composition

Find the optimal ratios between technical, GTM, G&A and operations teams, as well as the makeup of each team for any point in your growth journey.

See that at 50 people, around half of US SaaS teams are typically technical, with this dropping to 38% by 250. Within the technical team, at 250 headcount there’s usually 1 designer to every 8 engineers, while for the engineering team itself, 20% are frontend developers.

Plan leadership hiring

Establish when to hire and at what level of seniority. Should you be looking for a CFO or a director of finance? An HR manager or VP People?

For marketplace startups in the US, for example, 31% have a CFO by the time the company hits the 250 headcount threshold.

Review headcount

Consider which teams might be looking bloated or under-resourced, depending on your business model. Are you light on HR but overweight on marketing? Slim on sales but heavy on tech?

Find out that on average, in US SaaS companies with 125 employees, just over 41% of the organization is technical and 32% is in GTM. We see the reverse in non-US marketplace businesses, which are 29% technical and 32% GTM in TeamPlan.

Compare your attrition

Get insight into how many employees might leave the company during the next phase of growth. Will you need to backfill roles? How can you get ahead of potential talent losses?

Use TeamPlan to learn that, as your headcount increases from 51 to 125, five engineers and three marketers will likely leave your company. By reading Scaling through Chaos, you’ll discover that voluntary attrition of 12% is good. Above 15% is a yellow flag, and above 18% is a red flag.