For most successful startups, getting innovation right isn’t a problem, especially in the early stages. The founders, who had the bug idea in the first place, are still intimately involved, the teams are relatively small, and everyone is focused on building the best product possible.

Once things start to take off and the startup enters a period of high growth, however, things become a little more challenging.

Rather than a singular focus on building a product, the goal becomes finding ways to expand on it in a way that ensures continued growth.

In that kind of environment, it can be all too easy for innovation to fall by the wayside.

Thing is, it doesn’t have to be that way. Innovation is possible during periods of high growth. In fact, it’s vital to the success of any company that it continue innovating throughout such periods.

Here’s how to go about doing just that.

Hire right

One of the biggest challenges a startups face when they encounter success is having to rapidly hire large numbers of people.

Ensuring those people fit in with the founding culture isn’t always easy, especially when there’s pressure on to make the hires as soon as possible.

The go-to resource on hiring right is Netflix’s culture document. In its bid to build a “dream team”, the video streaming company focuses on people rather than process.

“More specifically,” it says, this allows it to “have great people working together as a dream team. With this approach, we are a more flexible, fun, inventive, stimulating, creative, and successful organization”.

It is, therefore, something worth getting right, especially when you remember that bad hires can rapidly spread negativity across the whole organisation.

As Netflix points out, “on a dream team, there are no ‘brilliant jerks’. The cost to teamwork is just too high”.

Keep it lean

Even when high-growth companies hire good cultural fits, they can still fall into the trap of hiring too many people too quickly.

When that happens, it becomes difficult to maintain accountability and increases the risk of resources being wasted.

But how do you avoid hiring too fast when your teams are feeling overworked and under pressure?

Well, the lean startup principle of innovation accounting comes into play here. This entails measuring progress, planning milestones, and prioritising.

Get this right and you’ll find that your teams become more efficient, enabling them to achieve more without the need for extra hires.

Keep your eye on the prize

When you’re experiencing high levels of growth, it’s easy to fall into the trap of taking your eyes off the prize.

Maybe you become complacent, thinking that if people love what you’re doing now, they’ll keep loving what you do in the future. Or maybe you’ve become so wrapped up in the day to day minutiae of managing a company experiencing high growth that it’s difficult to keep thinking about innovation.

In order to avoid either of those scenarios, it’s vital for companies to remember their founding purpose.

If you’ve hired right and kept your teams lean, that’s a little easier to do, but ultimately the responsibility for not getting complacent or getting bogged down in the details is the responsibility of the founders.

A smart founder will know that no success is permanent, especially if they’ve experienced a couple of previous failures. They’ll also know that if they can’t balance details and big ideas, then it’s in their own – and the company’s – best interests to hire someone to manage to day-to-day stuff while they look after the big ideas.

Don’t let growth dictate direction

While there’s more to getting innovation right during periods of high growth than we have space for here, getting the above right means that you’re much less likely to lose sight of innovation than if you didn’t.

One of the best ways to think about this is to realise that focusing on innovation means you’re not allowing growth to dictate the direction you take as a business.

If you can easily pivot, you know you’re on the right track.