Episode #29 - How to Scale From 70 to 1,000 People (Nadia Vatalidis - Head of People @ Doist)

Nadia Vatalidis, Head of People at Doist, discusses the evolution of organizational design within remote-first environments. She explores the shift from rigid structures to flexible, experiment-led growth and the importance of a growth mindset in a distributed workforce.

Learn the exact frameworks Doist, GitLab, and Remote used to build high-performing distributed teams across 80+ countries - and why traditional org structures fail at scale.

What You’ll Discover:

  • Why rigid organizational structures collapse during rapid scaling (and the flexible alternative that works)
  • The processes that break BEFORE culture does - and how to fix them early
  • How to implement “follow the sun” team coverage without burning out your people
  • Why AI is ending traditional job descriptions (and what’s replacing them)
  • The 3-part framework for high performance in distributed teams: adaptability, leverage, and behavior change
  • How to build continuous feedback systems that eliminate annual review surprises

Featuring Nadia Vatalidis, Head of People at Doist, who scaled Remote.com from 70 to 1,000 employees and GitLab from 75 to 1,300+ employees through their successful IPO.

About Nadia Vatalidis

Nadia Vatalidis is Head of People at Doist (creators of Todoist, the #1 task management app with 45M users). She has over a decade of experience scaling remote-first organizations, including growing Remote.com from 70 to 1,000 employees across 80+ countries and GitLab from 75 to 1,300+ employees in 60+ countries through their IPO. She specializes in remote-first organizational design, international expansion, and building self-enabled distributed cultures.

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Organizational design is not something that should be rigid; it is something you should experiment and pilot with your teams to see what actually works for the direction the company is taking.

Nadia Vatalidis
-
Head of People
@
Doist