"Growth should make the product smarter": which metrics a CEO checks before scaling an IT company

The decision to scale is often made on an emotional high: the company is showing good momentum, there are customers, and the team is demanding expansion. However, accelerating without a prior audit more often turns into growing complexity rather than strength. In an interview with RBC-Ukraine, Anton Aseev, CEO of the Ukrainian IT company SharksCode, explained which specific metrics should be checked before launching scaling, and how to distinguish growth that makes the product stronger from growth that merely makes it bloated.

Margin by business line: what the overall figure hides

The first thing to look at is not the overall growth figures, but the margin of each business line individually. According to Aseev, the overall margin averages out all the metrics and therefore hides what matters most: where the company is truly strong and where a line is "living more out of habit." It happens that one line carries the entire company while several others quietly erode it from below. As long as the overall trend is flying upward, no one sees this. But when scaling kicks in, the weak lines accelerate along with the strong ones — the company starts investing more effort in multiplying its own failures.

The cost of customization: when a product turns into outsourcing

The least pleasant but critically important part is the cost of customization and support. In IT this topic is often preferred to be ignored, because it is uncomfortable: the product is launched, everyone is happy, and then real life begins. The customer needs the solution tweaked to fit their processes, then adapted a little more, and then all of it maintained. When every new customer needs a solution built entirely for them, there is no product anymore — there is outsourcing pretending to be a product. Such a thing cannot be scaled, because every new agreement adds load to the team instead of strengthening the system. Aseev emphasizes: if the cost of support eats up all the profit from a deal, then something is wrong at the product architecture level. At SharksCode the principle is to build platforms rather than one-off solutions: a new customer comes on to something ready-made, not to reinventing the wheel from scratch.

Time to value: throughput without inflating headcount

Another underrated metric is the time from signing the contract to the moment when the customer actually works with the product and sees value from it. At SharksCode this is called time to value, and Aseev keeps this metric under constant control. The logic is simple: when implementation takes six months, it is physically impossible to take on many customers at once — the implementation team becomes the bottleneck. The desire to growth runs into the fact that every onboarding turns into a long and painful story. When implementation time is shortened, the throughput of the entire company grows without inflating headcount.

Customer retention: the main lie detector

Aseev calls customer retention the main lie detector. You can draw any good story about growth, but when customers leave, the story is fake. The stability of relationships shows whether the product is truly needed by people after the first wave of enthusiasm has passed. Attracting a new customer on a wave of marketing is easy; the hard part is making them stay for the second and third year. When a company sets out to scale with weak retention, it is simply pouring water into a leaky bucket: pouring faster, spending more, while the water level stays the same. Long-term partnerships, according to the CEO, give the most honest feedback about what works in the product and what needs to be redone.

Platform instead of one-off solutions: the economics of long-term relationships

The SharksCode approach is built on rejecting the chase for a quick sale. For the company it is important to build long-term relationships, because it is only over the distance that you can see whether the company's product is healthy. A customer who stays for years becomes a living indicator of quality: they show where the architecture works and where a rebuild is needed. The platform approach allows a new customer to come on to ready-made infrastructure, which radically reduces the cost of entry and accelerates time to value. Taken together, all the metrics listed — margin by business line, the ratio of acquisition to support cost, time to value, and retention — form a picture on the basis of which the CEO can make a balanced decision: scale exactly what really works, and not inflate what merely creates the appearance of growth.