How Rupon Anandanadarajah Helps SaaS Companies Outgrow Founder Intuition

"Most successful SaaS companies begin with strong intuition. Founders understand the problem deeply. Early decisions are fast, informal, and often correct. The closeness between insight and action creates momentum that is hard to replicate later. As companies grow, that intuition becomes harder to rely on. Teams expand, customers diversify, and systems become more complex. Decisions that once felt obvious now feel risky. Many organisations respond by pushing harder on the same instincts that drove early success. Rupon Anandanadarajah has seen where that leads."

"Intuition does not disappear as companies grow, but its reliability changes. Signals become noisier. Outcomes have multiple causes. Individual experience captures less of the full picture. When intuition continues to dominate decision making in larger organisations, problems emerge. Decisions bottleneck around senior leaders. Teams struggle to explain why certain choices were made. Disagreement turns personal because reasoning is implicit rather than shared."

"The shift Rupon guides is subtle but powerful. From instinct-driven decisions to intention-driven ones. Intention requires explicit reasoning. It asks teams to articulate what they believe, why they believe it, and what would change their minds. This does not eliminate judgment, but it makes judgment visible and discussable. When reasoning is shared, decision quality scales beyond a small group of leaders. Teams gain autonomy without losing alignment."

Most successful SaaS companies start with strong founder intuition that enables fast, informal, and often correct early decisions. As companies grow, signals become noisier, customers diversify, and systems grow complex, reducing the reliability of individual intuition. Continued reliance on instinct in larger organisations causes bottlenecks around senior leaders, opaque reasoning, and personal disagreements because decisions are implicit. The remedial shift replaces instinct-driven choices with intention-driven processes requiring explicit reasoning: teams must state beliefs, supporting logic, and disconfirming evidence. Shared reasoning allows decision quality to scale beyond a few leaders, improves autonomy, maintains alignment, and enables teams to explain outcomes rather than merely measure them.

Read at Business Matters