Hypergrowth is a blessing and a curse. Your company is taking off, revenue is climbing, and you're hiring new talent every week. But behind the scenes, operational chaos is brewing. Your IT and HR teams are drowning in a sea of manual tasks: onboarding new hires, processing promotions, managing team changes, and trying to securely offboard departing employees.
Traditional, click-based user management in various admin consoles simply can't keep pace. It's slow, prone to human error, and creates significant security gaps. What if you could manage your people, teams, and access rights with the same precision, automation, and version control you use for your software and infrastructure?
This is the promise of Directory as Code. By treating your organizational directory as a programmable, version-controlled asset, you can transform people operations from a scaling bottleneck into a streamlined, automated engine for growth.
If you're familiar with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), the concept will feel instantly familiar. Directory as Code is the practice of defining and managing your organizational structure—users, teams, reporting lines, and group memberships—in human-readable configuration files (like JSON or YAML) or via an API, rather than through a manual UI.
This code becomes the single source of truth for your organization's structure. At directory.do, we see it like this:
{
"user": {
"id": "usr_1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h",
"name": "Alice Johnson",
"email": "alice.j@example.com",
"title": "Director of Engineering",
"status": "active",
"manager": {
"id": "usr_9i8j7k6l5m4n3o2p",
"name": "Bob Williams"
},
"groups": [
"engineering-leads",
"all-employees"
]
}
}
When a change is made to this code—like adding a new user or moving someone to a different team—automated, agentic workflows execute the necessary actions across all your integrated systems. This brings the power of the modern software development lifecycle (version control, peer review, automation) to identity and access management.
As a company scales from 50 to 500 employees, manual processes that once worked begin to break down spectacularly.
Each new hire requires accounts in dozens of SaaS applications, access to specific code repositories, and inclusion in the right email lists and Slack channels. Doing this manually is a tedious checklist that can take days, delaying a new employee's productivity and leading to inconsistent permissions.
Hypergrowth companies are constantly evolving. Teams split, merge, and new departments are created overnight. Manually updating reporting lines, changing group memberships, and adjusting access controls for entire teams is a massive, error-prone undertaking.
A departed employee who retains access to company systems is a ticking time bomb. In the chaos of hypergrowth, it's terrifyingly easy to forget to revoke access from a single critical service. Each manual offboarding is a roll of the dice for your company's security.
Over time, employees accumulate permissions as they change roles or contribute to temporary projects. This "privilege creep" rarely gets cleaned up, leaving users with far more access than they need and creating a massive internal security risk and a compliance headache.
Directory as Code, powered by a user management API like directory.do, directly solves these scaling challenges by turning manual processes into automated, auditable workflows.
With Directory as Code, onboarding a new hire is as simple as a pull request. A manager or HR representative adds a new user definition to your directory configuration file. Once merged, an agentic workflow is triggered:
A process that took days and involved multiple people now happens in minutes, without errors.
Need to promote an Engineering Manager to a Director? Simply update their title and manager fields in the code. Re-organizing the entire marketing team? Move the user definitions under a new manager.
These changes are submitted as a pull request, allowing for review, comments, and a clear audit trail. Once approved, the changes are automatically propagated across your organizational directory, ensuring everyone's title and reporting structure is always up-to-date.
Offboarding becomes a bulletproof, one-line change.
That's it. An agentic workflow immediately kicks in, using the API to de-provision access to every single integrated application. Accounts are suspended, sessions are terminated, and access is revoked—all at once. The security hole is closed instantly and reliably, every single time.
Directory as Code eliminates access drift. Permissions are no longer granted on an ad-hoc, individual basis. Instead, access control is tied directly to group membership, which is defined in code.
Your version-controlled directory now serves as a perfect audit log. You can see exactly who had access to what, why they had it, and for how long, simply by looking at the commit history.
Shifting from manual administration to an automated, code-driven approach is the key to scaling your people operations securely. It allows you to manage your organization with the speed and reliability of software.
directory.do provides the powerful user management API and agentic workflows to make this a reality. By connecting to your identity providers and SaaS tools, you can build a robust, automated system for managing your most valuable asset: your people.
Ready to stop managing people with spreadsheets and start managing your organizational directory as code?
Explore directory.do and revolutionize your identity management.