Case 3 : N12 Technologies: Building an Organization and Building a Business

Ximena López Cifuentes

1. How effectively did the company manage the transition from four to 27 employees?

I think N12 has transitioned very effectively from 4 to 27 employees. N12 was creating
innovative technology that was evolving very quickly, the variety of markets and segments
they wanted to cover was wide and ambitious. They differentiated from traditional
organizations creating small and highly specialized teams able to generate innovative
technological developments in a very short time.
N12 learned to grow across all dimensions of the organization, not only technical and
operational, but also, the organization design tended to scalability of the value creation
process.

2. Do you think that Flavin went too fast or too slow in introducing formal structure at
N12?

I think the formal structure was introduced at the right time. As can be seen in the
timeline (Figure 1) in an early stage of the organization it was possible to create an
adequate and timely separation of functions and specialization of work. The main
characteristic of the markets in which the company wants to position itself is the high
degree of specialization and technical requirements, which N12 was able to identify and
solve very well by differentiating its value creation process and specializing it through the
engineering and the production, operation and quality processes. Coordination and
integration between teams was also successfully leaded by COO since his arrival to the
company.

3. What do Flavin and Berkson need to do next from an organizational perspective?

As Williams, Degtiarov and Deresh mentioned on several occasions, among most

important challenges brought by horizontal differentiation are coordination between
different departments and teams, communications and knowledge management.

At maturation stage, start-ups begin to face the challenge of staying innovative and
moving super-fast, and at the same time, initiating the formalization and standardization
of processes and procedures that allow them to replicate their victories in a consistent
way.

I’d recommend next steps seen on figure 2.

Figure 1 – N12 structure timeline
Figure 2- N12 next steps