May 27th, 2024
Scaling Your Software Engineering Team: Success Strategies
Congratulations! Your product has taken off, your consumer base is growing, and your business is entering a phase of rapid growth. But this development has you both excited and nervous. Scaling a software engineering team to keep up with growth can be a challenge, especially with limited resources—and especially if this is your first company.
Scaling a software engineering team doesn’t have to feel daunting. There are proven strategies that work to expand your team, both through external hiring and internal strategies like promotion and talent development. Let’s take a look at some of those strategies now.
Options for Scaling your Software Engineering Team
The manner in which your team grows will be dependent on the layout of your organization, how well the people within it work together, and how open the organization is to change.
Balancing the internal team with talent development and promotions
When most people think of scaling, they automatically think of increasing the number of available resources. In this case, hiring more people. But there are ways to scale that don’t involve hiring. Eventually, of course, you may reach a point where the workload is such that hiring becomes inevitable, but don’t jump to the conclusion that bringing on new people is necessarily the best way to solve productivity issues or bottlenecks.
Promotions
Promoting from within and restructuring are excellent ways to address these issues, particularly for startups who are just starting out and may not have the capital to grow the team. Rewarding high-performing engineers with a promotion (and matching pay bump) can spur productivity not only for the promoted engineers, but for others in the organization who aspire toward the same goal.
Restructuring can also streamline communication and improve the organization of the business overall. Clarifying roles and establishing clear hierarchies and responsibilities can go a long way in alleviating communication bottlenecks and improving efficiency.
Talent Development
If you have the resources, developing the talent you already have pays dividends. Your existing employees will always have a stronger drive to see the business succeed than new hires—this is especially true for startups where first-hires are usually passionate about the product or company.
External team integrations benefits
Hiring is an expensive process. It takes human capital and a lot of time invested to find the right people. But external hiring doesn’t necessarily have to mean taking on new engineers. You could use third-party software product development company services, software product engineering services, temporary hires, or other methods to fill the gaps.
When it does come to hiring, make sure that your existing engineers aren’t scaring off new hires. This can happen when engineers who have been with the company from the very beginning have been through the wringer putting out fires and doing the extremely difficult work of getting the company off the ground. They may have war stories. Make sure those war stories aren’t pushing people away.
When is the best time to scale your development team?
There are a few ways you can determine if now is the right time to scale.
- You can’t support your customer base with existing resources.
- Your platform is growing to incorporate new technologies and no one in the current organization has experience with those technologies.
- Deadlines are regularly being missed.
- You’re receiving overwhelmingly positive responses from customers, indicating that you have achieved product-market fit.
Challenges and considerations when scaling
Scaling is not without its difficulties. Watch out for the following pitfalls when you start growing your software engineering team.
Retaining Existing Engineers
The people you hire at the very beginning of your journey will be the kind of madcap mavericks you need to succeed at this time. They thrive on chaos and do well under pressure. This may also mean that they reject stability and traditional organizational structures.
To prevent these extremely valuable but slightly unhinged employees from jumping ship at the first sign of rigid corporate norms, make sure you are building a strong culture from the beginning. Involve these first hires in the development of the company mission statement and code and enlist their help in divulging this culture to the next generation of hires. Make them feel included in the process and they will be less likely to feel the company is changing into something they don’t recognize.
Roles
At the same time, consider what roles you’ll need your new hires to fill. If your scrappy engineering team is full of firefighters, consider balancing them with a few fire marshals who can establish regulations that will prevent fires from happening in the first place.
When to Stop Scaling your engineering team?
It may seem counterintuitive to think about when to stop scaling, but it’s important to streamline your software to avoid bloating and curtail them before they happen. You might consider stopping scaling when you start to notice the following:
- Rigid processes and bureaucracy are trumping delivering value to customers.
- Metrics like number of new features shipped are dropping even though more hires are being brought in
- Friction is increasing between teams.
- Morale is decreasing.
Overall, scaling an engineering team is a wild and exciting ride. Keep the above tips in mind and you’ll see growth and productivity heading in a positive direction.
