A guide to making you and your team as productive (and happy!) as possible as you grow to face new challenges.

1. Scaling Humans
You and your team more productive at scale

2. Growing is awesome

3. Growing is hard

4. Startup?
Enterprise?
Something in between?

5. You

6. Making yourself more productive
● Do the important stuff… and then let yourself be done
● Write it down and cross it off
● Take real breaks and vacations, disconnect
● You are not a robot, you are a creative being that needs to recharge

7. Burnout

8. Making yourself happy
● Do the important stuff… and then let yourself be done
● Write it down and cross it off
● Take real breaks and vacations, disconnect
● You are not a robot, you are a creative being that needs to recharge

9. Tools of the Trade

10. intelligent change . com

11. intelligent change . com

12. Team of 1

13. Team of 2

14. Team of 5

15. Team of 10

16. Team of 33

17. Team of ???

18. Your team

19. Agile

20. “ agile ”

21. Being agile
● Use milestones and celebrate wins
○ Software is never done
○ Never finishing anything leads to burnout
● Allocate work based on passion
○ People can be superhuman when they are motivated
○ Procrastination does not stem from lack of knowledge, but lack of desire
● Collaborate and plan before you build
○ Why run a marathon to find a dead end?
○ Leverage your team before you waste time and money

22. Tools of the trade

23. Premature optimization

24. Outgrowing your tools

25. Pick tools that work for you
● There is not one perfect tool for anything
● Builds and deployment
○ Heroku
○ Jenkins + AWS
● Project management
○ Waffle vs JIRA
○ GitHub / GitLab Integrations
○ Always use tickets and pull requests - even if you are solo

26. github . com / marketplace

27. Automate

28. Let robots do the boring, painful stuff
● Write tests
○ F.I.T. Principle: Frequency + Impact + Time
● Use CI / CD
○ Run your tests, linters, and checks every time you make a change
○ Deploy small changes, often
● Database migrations and seeds
○ Invest the hour into a DB migration tool
○ Do not do scary things by hand

29. Hiring more humans

30. Expanding strategically
● You need more than developers ( DPS )
○ … but they should make up the majority of your team
○ Senior vs mid-level vs junior
○ Local vs remote - are you ready?
● You need QA and Ops ( Healer )
○ Too big for bugs
○ Too big for downtime
● You need POs, SM / PM ( Tank )
○ The better your inputs, the better your outputs

31. The ultimate team

32. ¡ Gracias !
Charles V Burgess
Senior Developer @ Perch Security
GitHub: cvburgess
Web: cvburgess.com
Email: consulting@cvburgess.com
LinkedIn: cvburgess