Tips and tricks to stay fit when scaling an Engineering Team: hiring, culture, management, technical practices... How to avoid the growth issues.

1. Scaling an Engineering Team

2. Want to scale?
 So you have a successful
Company / Startup.
 Business is rocketing…
 …and Engineering cannot
follow the speed of Business.
 You need to scale!
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3. Beware of growing too fast
 More bureaucracy
 Less productivity
 Worse product because of
bad communication
 Breaking the culture
 Cost and complexity
…tips and tricks to stay fit!
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4. Hiring
 Build a strong Hiring pipeline
 Formalize the process. Share and involve the whole team.
 Empower the Hiring Managers. They are accountable for hiring.
 Professionalize hiring: use tools to support it (ATS like Greenhouse)
 Understand your current salary bands. Define appropriate hiring bands (also
based on market).
 Be visible on the market and in tech community (blog, meetups,
conferences, open-source software).
 Measure it and optimize it like a Sales/Marketing funnel
 Top of funnel = sourcing
 Conversion rate at each step
 Closing the deal
 Formalize and be disciplined
about on-boarding new hires.
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5. Growing the people
 Scaling a team is also about growing the people.
 Make sure every individual knows what it means for
them when the team gets bigger:
 role, career evolution, opportunities of growth…
 Especially if you hire senior people who will come in to manage
the existing teams
 Set up a culture of Continuous Learning
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6. Management
 Managers in Engineering teams are usually ex-Developers and are not
necessarily trained to manage.
 Explicitely train them towards management.
 Delegation: it is usually difficult for an ex-developer to release control on some
important pieces of code.
 Time organization: it is very hard for a developer to start mixing his time with
management tasks
 Differentiate Management and Leadership: Tech Lead is not People Management.
 Invest into improving and scaling your management practices.
 Put a special focus on practices that facilitate on-boarding and maintain
consistency:
 Knowing each other (try tools like Personal Maps)
 Team Culture (see next slide)
 Team Building
 1:1
 Management by Walking Around
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7. Culture
 Adding new members to a team can break the spirit of the team.
 How do you define your team culture? What are your values?
 Define your culture and values together as a team to use it as a
hiring filter.
 Test for culture fit (which is not incompatible with diversity).
 It is also a good opportunity to define team ambitions.
 Are your teams happy? Harder to evaluate when you scale, so pay
attention to it.
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8. Team Structure
 Split the teams: teams of small teams.
 But figure out how to manage dependencies and align teams.
 Define the team type that suits your context:
 Feature teams
 Platform teams
 Hybrid teams
 Avoid 100% component teams.
 Visualize dependencies: avoid coupled teams.
 Guidelines:
 3 to 9 members in a team
 Stable(ish), full-time, colocated
 With a mission
 Clear stakeholders/customers
 Cross-functional
 Autonomous
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9. Technical practices
 A team cannot scale efficiently without strong technical practices.
 Think automation and industrialization.
 Think quality.
 Think autonomy and responsibility.
 How do you ensure that when going from a small team to a bigger team you
keep the same level of quality, of speed and reliability.
 Must haves:
 Continuous integration
 Systematic code review
 Automated tests (unit tests, functional tests,…)
 Automated Build & Deploy mechanisms
 Start reducing your Technical Debt
 …
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10. Project Management
 In an Agile environment, make sure you have good agile basics and team
structure before scaling.
 You need efficient tools (and know how to use them collaboratively).
Minimum would be things like Jira+Confluence, or anything similar.
 Documentation: organize your documentation so it can be used easily by
newcomers – reduce your Documentation debt.
 When scaling Agile teams, you risk creating silos.
 Add a Portfolio vision on top of your Agile teams to keep a high-level company
view and proper prioritization and cross-dependencies management.
 Rethink how you slice projects
 Scaling needs to happen
at Enterprise level
 Stop Starting. Start Finishing.
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11. Communication
 Enforce cross-team communications.
 Scale the Feedback Loop
 For instance a monthly team meeting where all the teams share their accomplishments and plans.
 Shared Roadmap reviews
 Multi-teams retrospectives
 Also build opportunities for communication, by mix-and-
matching people from different teams:
 Shared tech projects
 Shared team initiatives (organization, management, team life…)
 Organize regular team buildings and team life events so that
people socialize together: games (Lego4scrum, Marshmallow
challenges,…), meals (team breakfasts, drinks,…)
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12. Questions
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13. References
 http://blog.crisp.se/2015/11/23/henrikkniberg/real-life-
agile-scaling-agile-keynote
 http://ethikonsulting.com/management-game/
 https://management30.com/product/workouts/
 http://blog.crisp.se/2013/03/14/henrikkniberg/stop-
starting-start-finishing-my-slides-on-how-to-improve-
your-life
 http://fr.slideshare.net/betclicTech/betclic-training-
continuouslearning
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