Scaling High-Growth Software
Organizations

What is high-
growth?

And that growth
happens in phases

My first startup
experience

Large company
experience

The growth in-
between

Decision making in
high growth
People Strategy
Organizational Strategy
Technical Strategy

People Strategy

People Strategy “Twitter grew from about 90 to
1,500 people in less than three
years. A company that grows that
rapidly is literally a different
company every six months.”
Elad Gil - past VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter and
Product Manager at Google

People Strategy Software Role Evolution
Startups weight engineering breadth over
specialization.
Large companies weight specialization over
breadth.
In high-growth software companies
you make a balanced investment in
specialization and breadth.

People Strategy Software Recruiting & Culture
Culture changes with people constantly and
engineering dynamics change with it.
Hiring priority shifts constantly from
thought leaders to key performers.

People Strategy
Making a balanced investment in
specialization and breadth.

Organizational
Strategy

Organizational
Strategy
“When companies are in startup
mode they don’t prioritize orgs [...]
As a result you tend to Band-Aid
or gap-fill these functions that
aren’t core in the early days.”
Ruchi Sanghvi - past VP of Operations at Dropbox,
first female engineer at Facebook

Organizational
Strategy
Functional
High engineering alignment, think front-end,
backend, and mobile on a single team.
Hybrid to Matrix
Optimal for developing specialized and
expertise engineering roles.

Organizational
Strategy
Consider Spotify’s Agile Scaling Model:

Organizational
Strategy
In step with people strategy to balance
output efficiency and people
overhead.

Technical Strategy

Technical Strategy Know Your Type of Growth
Companies scale differently based on their
business, and technology must serve
business outcomes.
Don’t jump to technical solutions because
it’s what <Tech-Firm> says is best practice.

Technical Strategy Software Architecture & Infrastructure
Software is a massive tool set of languages,
libraries, frameworks, and platforms. There
is no technical right way.
Investments including Kubernetes,
microservice architectures, and language
rewrites are extremely expensive. They only
deliver high ROI when the business or
growth outcome is right.

Technical Strategy Software Tooling
Consider the build vs. buy paradigm and
that software engineers are generally
biased to build.
Software tooling must lead people,
technical, and organization growth by at
least it’s implementation time.

Technical Strategy
Balance high impact business
outcomes against opportunity cost.

Scaling High-
Growth Software
Organizations
People Strategy
Organizational Strategy
Technical Strategy

Summarizing high-
growth decision
making