Bringing Startup Culture to Enterprise Dev
Published: November 17, 2025
If there’s one thing we’ve seen since the dotcom boom and SaaS explosion, it’s that a near-zero cost to scale has allowed startups out-innovate established firms with 1,000x their budget, technical expertise, and customer base.
Remember Skype-ing your relatives in 2018? Enter Zoom, capturing a huge portion of the consumer video call market from Microsoft, one of the largest tech companies with some of the brightest engineers and developers in the world. Two-pizza teams, fast iterations, and quick decision making - those qualities are often part of the winning formula.
Large organizations often admire how startups move quickly, innovate, and learn. But when you’re part of a big company, it can be hard to recreate that same energy. The good news? You don’t have to become a startup—you just need to think like one when it matters.
Kill the silos - just let them talk
Nothing kills momentum faster than: "James wrote this code, should I talk to his team lead or his manager first?" Startups don’t wait; they cold-call, message, or walk over to the person who can get them the answer. At DevPro, we encourage a zero-friction communication approach. Developers are taught to reach out immediately, get the info, and move forward. It’s a small change, but can be a huge speed boost.
Start with the right people
This doesn’t mean you don’t already have talented teams - it’s about mindset. It’s hard to see new ways of working when you’ve been doing things the same way for a long time. Bringing in someone who’s been forged in the fire of a startup can inject a new perspective. People who’ve worked in small, fast-moving environments often have a broad skillset and a push for action. They know how to rally others around a goal and get things done with limited resources.
Pick something that can fail
Don’t start with your company’s core product or most critical system. Startups embrace the idea of "fail fast and pivot," but that’s not a strategy you can safely apply to your bread and butter. Instead, carve out a project, a new feature, or an experiment where it’s okay if things don’t work out. The goal is to learn quickly and adjust without putting the rest of the business at risk.
Not every experiment will succeed - that’s fine. Adjust the team, tweak the scope, and try again. Keep the scale small until the model works. The goal isn’t just one successful project it’s to build a repeatable mechanism for agility inside your organization.
Don’t change everything all at once
You don’t need to reinvent everything to move like a startup. You can use the tools you already have, but keep an open mind for trying new ones when they can solve a real problem. Chasing every new trend usually leads to chaos, not speed. Instead, focus on using the right tool for the job. Most modern languages and frameworks can do far more than they get credit for, so don’t abandon what already works just because something new is trending. True agility comes from thoughtful choices, not constant reinvention.
Remember what success means at the end of the trial, it could be one or more of the following:
- Delivering something to end users faster than you might have.
- Building something quickly to impress the business units
- Reinvigorating your development teams. Most developers just want to build, thinking like a startup can improve their ability to do that.
At DevPro, our developers come from both worlds - 3-5 person startups where one dev owns a feature end-to-end and needs to get it shipped 'before the money runs out', to enterprises and crown corps where approvals, release cycles, and legacy systems rule the day. We’ve learned that it’s possible for any enterprise org to apply startup-like principles and see huge improvements in software output.
