This issue’s topic is building teams, scaling, and growth. Have a great time reading, be mindful.
1. Ott Kaukver: ex CTO of Twilio about scaling
Just recently Twilio acquired Segment, the market-leading customer data platform. Let’s look back and research how they achieved scaling and such high growth before. “Anchored by these small teams, our business unit–based structure allowed Twilio to become a collection of startups working symbiotically within a large company.” – Ott Kaukver
The process: How Twilio scaled its engineering structure - Increment: Teams
2. Transferwise: Product Engineering Principles
Transferwise is a similar company to Twilio in terms of organizational principles and the wide application and promotion of a product engineering mindset. Read this overview of their principles to better understand how these principles helped to achieve phenomenal growth.
Product Engineering Principles at TransferWise
3. Intercom: Lessons learned from scaling a team
Des Traynor is a co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Intercom and he has a great talk and an article on how critical people are. There is one debatable point about hierarchy and more flat structures, but I really like the importance of early hires, alignment, responsibilities and impact. “It’s all about the people.” Love the visuals in the post as well.
People are key to scaling your startup
4. Shopify: How Shopify Scales Up Its Development Teams
In this article Larry Lumsden - Vice President of Engineering, Shopify uncovers topics such as hiring great people and building effective teams. How Shopify Scales Up Its Development Teams
5. From Trello blog: The Organized Chaos Approach To Scaling A Team
On what challenges x.ai company faced while scaling their teams, how they prioritized, and how they achieved transparency, and many more in the article below. Written by Dennis R. Mortensen, CEO and Founder of x.ai.
The Organized Chaos Approach To Scaling A Team
6. Kevin Stewart: How to build a startup engineering team.
Previously, Kevin held VP of engineering positions at Fastly, Heptio (now VMware), and NodeSource, and was a director of engineering at Adobe. This is advice for when you’re starting from scratch and designing for growth in the form of this great post. “Startups are hard. Engineering leadership is hard. People are hard.” and “Balance is important: When you achieve it, you’ll be able to tackle the most difficult challenges—from startup to enterprise.”Kevin Stewart said and I can only agree.
How to build a startup engineering team - Increment: Teams
Inspiring quote:
"The process of scaling a company is not unlike the process of scaling a product. Different sizes of company impose different requirements on the company’s architecture. If you address those requirements too early, your company will seem heavy and sluggish. If you address those requirements too late, your company may melt down under the pressure. Be mindful of your company’s true growth rate as you add architectural components. It’s good to anticipate growth, but it’s bad to over-anticipate growth." - Ben Horowitz
Be curious, keep creating.