Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm described a gap in the product adoption lifecycle that many otherwise promising products fail to bridge: the distance between early adopters, who tolerate rough edges and value novelty, and the mainstream market, which values reliability, integration, and predictability. The insight was profound and has held up well.

What is less commonly discussed is the cultural corollary: the culture that makes an organisation successful with early adopters is often incompatible with what the mainstream market demands. The gap is not only in the product — it is in the organisation itself.

Culture and the product lifecycle

In the early stages of a product, the dominant cultural values tend to be innovation, adaptability, and risk appetite. The team that built the product is typically small, fast-moving, and comfortable with ambiguity. Decision-making is informal. Processes are lightweight. The culture that describes this is what organisational theorists tend to map to a "Create" or "Adhocracy" quadrant — high on flexibility, high on external focus, low on stability.

This culture is genuinely well-suited to the early market. It produces novelty, responds quickly to unexpected opportunities, and attracts the kind of talent that builds new things. It is also, almost inevitably, unsustainable as scale increases.

As a product matures and enters the mainstream market, enterprise customers — who represent the majority of revenue in most B2B sectors — begin to dominate the buyer profile. Enterprise customers do not value novelty. They value robustness, security, predictability, and support. They need the product to integrate with their existing systems and to be maintained reliably over years. The culture they need to deal with is patient, structured, and process-oriented — far closer to the "Control" or "Hierarchy" quadrant than to the innovative culture that built the product.

The pace of change compounds the challenge

Several technology companies illustrate how fast this transition can happen and how difficult it is to manage. Nvidia's growth during the AI and cryptocurrency wave required rapid cultural adaptation across teams that had previously operated in a relatively stable market. Miro's expansion during the pandemic lockdowns moved the company from a startup cultural profile to an enterprise one in a matter of months. In both cases, the product succeeded — but the cultural work required to support that success was significant and largely invisible from the outside.

Figma's situation after the blocked Adobe acquisition is instructive in a different way: a potential reset in the product lifecycle creates a corresponding disruption in the cultural journey. The culture that had successfully served Figma's growth may need to be partially unwound before being rebuilt in a different configuration.

What leaders need to do

The mistake most commonly made is treating culture as a background variable — something that can be adjusted later, after the product work is done. The product work is never done. Culture change needs to be driven proactively, in anticipation of the market stage the organisation is approaching rather than in reaction to the stage it has already reached.

This means leaders need to understand where their product sits in its lifecycle and what cultural profile is required for that stage. It means being willing to change how the organisation works in ways that may feel like losses to the people who built the early success. And it means communicating with unusual honesty about why the change is happening — because the people who thrived in the early-stage culture often cannot see why it needs to change when, from their perspective, it has been working perfectly.

The good news is that this is a solved problem, at least in principle. Organisations that manage the cultural transition well tend to do so by making it explicit: naming the cultural shift that is required, designing interventions to support it, and measuring whether the shift is actually happening rather than assuming it will. None of that is easy. But it is considerably easier than discovering, after the fact, that the mainstream market has found a competitor whose culture was better suited to serve it.