What part does culture play in scaling up a company? How do you preserve a culture through periods of rapid growth and why does it matter? An experience report covering a 2 year period.

1. Scaling an Engineering
Team
1
Neil Johnson - @neilisfragile

2. What am I going to talk about?
2
Culture
Organisational Structure
Technology Choices
Hiring
1.
2.
3.
4.
But really everything is about culture

3. 3
Culture

4. Culture is what you reward, what you punish
and what you tolerate.
Culture is important because it is what binds the
team together and underpins every important
decision an organisation makes.
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5. 5
It is essential that an organisation determines
what it really values and makes choices that
support these values.
If you can’t write down what is important about
your culture, you can’t preserve it.

6. 6
Organisational
Structure

7. 7
Understand your culture, then find a
structure that supports it.
Not every one is Spotify
Staff your teams with the skills they need,
culture determines what is possible.

8. 8
Define the purpose of each team.

9. 9
Technology

10. Conway’s Law
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"Any organization that designs a system (defined
broadly) will produce a design whose structure is
a copy of the organization's communication
structure."

11. 11
With more people working on the same code base,
good communication becomes critical to manage
dependencies and ensure that the group doesn’t
grind to a halt.

12. Simon Brown
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“If you can’t build a well-structured monolith,
what makes you think microservices are the
answer?“

13. Be certain that before you reach for Microservices
that problem is really about technology and not
about people.
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14. 14
Hiring

15. 15
Culture fit is a first class citizen.

16. 16
Create a scalable interview process.
Interviews should be structured, with a clear rubric
for each section of the interview
Interviewers need training, both on the subject
matter, but also on how to give an interview.

17. 17
Diverse teams have better outcomes.
http://projectinclude.org/

18. Think consciously about culture and codify
what is important, then:
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Arrange the organisation to reflect the culture
Make technology choices that support the culture
Design hiring processes that select on cultural
attributes as a first class citizen
1.
2.
3.

19. thank you
Neil Johnson - @neilisfragile
@makinglyst
https://making.lyst.com/