Team Building Through Chaos: How to Scale Without Breaking Your Org

Akihiro Uono, ex-NewsPicks HR lead, explains how scaling from 80 to 300 people created organizational chaos and what actually worked to navigate it.

• NewsPicks scaled from 80 to ~300 people over roughly 4 years; Uono led HR through that entire transition as head of HR.
• The ‘chaos phase’ reliably hits around 50 people or immediately after PMF, when hiring accelerates and cultural backgrounds collide.
• Uono’s biggest failure: importing Recruit-style rituals into a new engineering org without first understanding what the team actually wanted — people started avoiding him.
• After a CEO told him his 1-on-1s were ‘meaningless,’ he spent 2 years earning a coaching certification; he now enters 1-on-1s with no agenda and lets the other person surface what matters.
• His two-step framework for surviving chaos: deep mutual understanding first, then co-create a team vision together in workshop sessions — revisit it every time the team composition changes significantly.
• Three skills he recommends leaders develop: emotional self-expression, conflict management, and organizational learning (making insights stick as the team turns over).
• Double-loop learning: organizations that have ‘succeeded’ tend to stop questioning their own processes — new hires who came from different loops are an asset if you actively invite their challenge.
• Career framing: combining business operations experience with HR is rare; Uono credits the ‘rare card’ concept from Recruit’s Fujiwara — stacking two deep specializations creates near-zero competition.

2025-06-26 · Watch on YouTube