As businesses grow, relationships between teams become more complex and burdensome—especially when most operations are managed from a headquarters in another country. At the same time, there is a growing emphasis on localization and adapting to the unique needs of the markets where businesses are expanding.
Here are some of the main challenges faced by leaders of international groups:
- Trust in locally delegated teams
- Efficiency between business and technical teams, which often struggle to understand one another
- An ever-growing task list
- Cultural differences and variations in labor laws
These challenges cannot be solved simply by organizing off-sites or corporate seminars. While everything might run smoothly during the event, the core pain points of daily operations remain unchanged. Instead, what’s needed is to facilitate everyday interactions so that every team member can perform at their best.
iGaming organisational specificities
For Affiliates:
- SEO and tech are indispensable levers for driving revenue and ensuring business sustainability.
For Operators:
- Functions like tech, product, legal, and compliance are critical for operators and are central to business growth. Strong collaboration between these departments is key to success.
Managing Organizations During Hypergrowth and International Expansion
How can organizations maximize value and results in international markets managed from halfway across the world? As these challenges grow alongside the business, organizing critical growth and revenue-driving sectors becomes both a puzzle and a necessity.
During the process of structuring teams and scaling growth, it is essential to implement an “intermediary” organization capable of ensuring that projects, teams, and delivery quality align with the strategy set by headquarters.
Frameworks for successful localization
Here are some examples of organizational frameworks that help instill the culture, strategy, and expertise of the central team into local teams effectively:
- These frameworks enable the upward flow of relevant project needs and initiatives from local markets to the Group level, facilitating communication and deployment across other regions.
In such models, the term “Specialists” or “Centers of Excellence” refers to the key skills outlined earlier in the article: SEO, tech, product, data, legal, etc. In certain cases, even marketing could be adapted to better fit local cultural and market-specific nuances.
It is crucial to emphasize that the most critical teams for the company’s growth and revenue must serve as the pillars of such frameworks.
The Tribe Model: A winning approach to manage growth
A tribe-based organizational structure is a powerful way to manage growth in individual markets directly from the headquarters, whether based in Malta, Gibraltar, or elsewhere. Similar to a product team, a tribe benefits from mechanisms that ensure both internal alignment and external coordination with other tribes and the company’s broader strategy.
These decentralized governance structures do not undermine leadership; on the contrary, they relieve central teams and streamline strategy execution while improving communication.
Scaling initiatives & projects at a worldwide scale.
In this model, the notion of “markets” can also be applied to:
- A product
- An asset (e.g., a website or an application)
While these methods may seem counterintuitive to agile principles, they do not hinder project or feature management in an agile framework. Delivery can still be carried out in sprints, and features can be reprioritized, canceled, or adjusted as needed. These organizational frameworks provide a structure that fosters better interactions between local teams and headquarters.
By implementing well-designed frameworks and fostering seamless collaboration, companies can overcome the complexities of hypergrowth and international expansion, unlocking sustained success in local and global markets.
Contact us if you are facing organizational issues or want to smooth team cooperation at a global scale. We’ve done it for iGaming businesses as for retail ones
Pierric Blanchet
Founder @ TGC