AP-024
An agency can begin providing ongoing Catalogue Optimisation to a small number of clients without needing a complicated operating model.
The team knows where catalogue activity needs attention. Someone remembers which supplier update arrived yesterday. A colleague knows why one client uses a particular product structure while another handles the same type of information differently.
If something is waiting for approval, someone usually knows about it.
If a new product arrives, the person closest to the account often knows what needs to happen next.
At that scale, the arrangement can work very well.
Then the number of ongoing clients grows.
More supplier changes arrive. More products need adding. More corrections need reviewing. More client decisions need to be remembered and applied when the next change reaches the catalogue.
The obvious response is to add another capable person.
That may be exactly what the agency needs.
But the new person also needs to know what the existing team already knows.
They need to understand where catalogue activity needs attention, what has already happened, which decisions apply, what is waiting for the client, what should happen next and what requires review.
Adding people increases the agency’s capacity to perform Catalogue Optimisation.
It does not by itself create a dependable way for a growing team to carry an increasing number of ongoing catalogue responsibilities.
Consider an agency maintaining three client catalogues.
One team member works closely with all three accounts.
They know that one client approves every change before publication while another has already agreed how routine product additions should be handled.
They remember that a supplier is expected to send updated specifications on Friday.
They know why one client has established a particular terminology convention for its catalogue and why another has deliberately made a different decision.
Another member of the team may know most of the same context.
When something changes, they talk.
A project board, shared inbox or short internal message fills whatever gap remains.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach.
The agency does not need to formalise every interaction simply because ongoing Catalogue Optimisation exists.
When the portfolio is small and the people involved remain close to the activity, familiarity can provide enough visibility and continuity to operate the service dependably.
The important question is whether that approach remains dependable as the responsibility grows.
Suppose the agency now maintains ten catalogues rather than three.
On Monday, one client sends a new supplier file containing twelve products and several revised specifications.
Another client has a batch of catalogue corrections waiting for approval.
A third has recently agreed a new way of presenting compatibility information, and the next products arriving from that supplier need to follow the decision.
There is clearly more activity.
But the agency now has to keep track of more client-specific context around that activity.
A product addition for one client may be routine.
The same type of addition for another may require approval.
A terminology choice that is correct in one catalogue may conflict with an established convention in another.
One update can be completed immediately. Another is waiting for supplier information. A third has already been completed but still needs review.
A longer task list does not describe all of this.
The agency has to know not only what needs doing, but how each item fits into the continuing responsibility it carries for that catalogue. New supplier information arrives. Products move through different stages, approvals are given and completed activity changes what needs attention next. The current state of that responsibility therefore keeps changing.
As the portfolio grows, the agency has to keep the current state of more ongoing catalogue responsibilities usable at the same time, including when activity moves between people.
A task count can show how much activity is open without showing what is ready to proceed, blocked, waiting for input or still requiring review.
An agency might know that 40 catalogue items are currently open.
That is useful.
But it is not enough if the team still has to ask which ones are urgent, which ones are waiting for client input, which decisions govern them or whether another person has already started dealing with them.
The problem is not necessarily that any individual task is difficult.
A product may follow a perfectly clear structure.
A specification change may be straightforward.
A new attribute value may already have an established convention.
The difficulty can sit around the activity instead.
For each item, someone still needs to know where it belongs, whether it is ready to proceed, who owns the next action and what should happen before it is considered complete.
A growing Catalogue Optimisation business therefore accumulates more than execution volume.
It accumulates more ongoing catalogue responsibility whose current state has to remain visible and understandable across the agency.
If the team is receiving more legitimate catalogue activity than it can complete, adding another person can be the correct decision.
A capable additional team member can prepare more products, process more supplier changes, make more corrections and review more catalogue information.
There is no reason to treat increased headcount as a failure.
A larger ongoing service can genuinely require a larger team.
But the additional person does not arrive with the catalogue context already in their head.
Someone has to explain the different arrangements each client follows.
They need to know where established decisions are recorded.
They need to see which activity is current, which is blocked and which is waiting for approval.
They need a way to distinguish an ordinary product update from one that depends on an earlier client decision.
They need to know whether someone else has already taken responsibility for the task they are about to start.
If those things remain available primarily through conversations and individual memory, another person increases both execution capacity and the amount of coordination required to use that capacity.
The agency can hire successfully and still find that more people are spending more time asking one another for context.
A better system does not necessarily mean introducing a large software platform or turning every catalogue action into a formal procedure.
It means making the important parts of ongoing responsibility dependable beyond individual memory.
The agency needs to be able to see what requires attention across its client portfolio.
The person handling an item needs access to the catalogue standards, previous decisions or client-specific requirements that affect it.
The team needs a dependable basis for knowing what should be handled first and what is waiting on someone else.
Responsibility needs to remain clear when activity moves between team members, reviewers, clients or suppliers.
Someone taking over appropriate activity should not have to reconstruct the entire history before they can proceed.
Review and approval also need enough visibility for the agency to know whether something has genuinely been completed or has simply disappeared from the immediate conversation.
Different agencies can support these needs in different ways.
Some will use structured processes and existing project tools.
Others will develop more specialised systems as their Catalogue Optimisation business becomes larger or more complex.
The important point is not the technology.
It is whether the agency can carry the current state of its continuing catalogue responsibilities reliably across the team.
As ongoing Catalogue Optimisation expands, the agency has to scale more than its capacity to perform catalogue activity.
It also has to scale its ability to carry the current state of each continuing catalogue responsibility across the team.
The agency cannot depend on particular people simply knowing that state.
A growing team is still valuable.
But additional people are more useful when they join an established way of carrying that responsibility rather than having to reconstruct its current state for themselves.
Professional judgement still matters.
Client-specific decisions still matter.
People still perform the Catalogue Optimisation.
The system does not replace any of those things.
It makes them usable across a growing portfolio rather than leaving too much of the operation dependent on who happens to know what.
When an ongoing Catalogue Optimisation business starts becoming difficult to manage, the agency should not automatically treat the problem as evidence that the team is too small.
It should ask two different questions.
Is there more legitimate catalogue activity than the current team has capacity to perform?
And can the agency’s current way of operating carry the current state of its ongoing catalogue responsibilities dependably across more clients and more people?
Those questions can produce different answers.
If there is more activity than the team can perform but the existing operating model remains dependable, the agency primarily needs more capacity.
If capacity is sufficient but too much of the operation depends on individual memory, informal handoffs and repeated conversations, the operating system needs attention.
In a growing business, both can also be true at the same time.
That distinction matters because hiring and operating systems do different jobs.
Additional people increase the amount of Catalogue Optimisation the agency can perform.
A dependable system allows the current state of recurring activity, client-specific context, responsibility and review to remain usable across those people as the portfolio changes.
Agencies intending to expand ongoing Catalogue Optimisation should therefore make the current state of each continuing catalogue responsibility visible and usable across the team, rather than relying on individual people to remember and coordinate it.
Where genuine volume requires a larger team, those people can then add capacity within an operating system that already gives them a dependable basis for knowing what needs attention, what applies and what should happen next.