You want to grow your organization, while maintaining the speed, easy communication, and culture you've enjoyed at small scale. It's not easy.

I've lived this journey many times: figuring out how you'll recruit great people, align around a common vision, and build productive low-attrition teams. Deciding how you want to add structure around roles and responsibilities, goal-setting, design reviews, and project planning, and where that's stultifying overkill.

In larger or rapidly-growing organizations, challenges includes inter-team collaboration, effective meetings, and helping some people transition to manager or manager-of-managers roles which take a different mindset. As well as more structure for interviewing, role expectations, compensation, and so on.

You have a creative new technology, but the possibilities seem open-ended, or you feel tension between working on every facet of it at once vs. focusing. How do you prioritize where to invest the team's time?

Review and critique of technology and product plans. First-principles system analysis and prioritization (help draw good-enough modularity boundaries within complex interdependent systems). Early concept design to flesh out options for future in-house work. Help building mental frameworks for decision-making. 

This can also be structured as a longer-term on-call-as-needed engagement.

You have working prototypes of your product, hand-built by the designers or even the founders.

How do you scale up to building  100s or 10,000s of these and get out of the "each prototype is slightly different and custom" world?

At first, this might be by adding lightweight processes, tools, data collection, and best practices, allowing you to build systematically in-house. At this stage, growing an internal culture of manufacturing is at least as important as the choice of tools.

Later, this might involve a shift to a production mindset, where standardization, traceability, and decisions driven by data and statistics are key. You may also shift some or all of your production to vendors domestically and/or overseas, depending on your differentiators and the value of keeping final assembly and test in-house.

I can provide guidance on this entire process, from getting the quick good-enough internal processes in place, to traveling to critically evaluate potential vendors, partners, and factories.

Many weeks I feel like the most useful thing I've done is introduce good people to each other and get out of the way.

I have a wide network of former colleagues, fellow consultants and advisors who specialize in different areas, and vendors I've worked with. There's no business or commission here for me.

Let's get coffee. 

You're focused on your core technology, but you have ideas for improvements, next-gen products, or accessories.

Custom mechanical, electrical, and software prototypes on fast timelines. Sometimes the goal is just to show the feasibility of something, or to be able to collect initial field or customer data.

You want to scale up lab experiments, product testing, or manufacturing by 100x or more, while maintaining consistency and quality, but that's not practical to do by hand.

Custom lab and pilot-scale* tools combining mechanical and electric systems, robot arms, sensors / machine vision, and software. Repurposing existing automation (e.g. automation from other industries bought on the used market) with new hardware/software interfaces for your experimental use case.

*As a small company I can not provide 24/7  factory floor support, so to deploy production-floor tools I would either transfer knowledge to your internal team, or help you engage with a larger system integrator.