Growing the tech team from 10 to 20 engineers can kill your tech department.

Growing from 10 to 20 engineers can kill your tech department. Let me explain.

When the team is small you don’t need many processes. You only need that your people hang out and talk to each other. It’s intimate. There is a feeling of shared purpose. A new joiner talks to everyone before the team decides if he is a good fit.

Let’s say the business is successful and the backlog of features is growing. You probably took on some tech debt to ship the first versions, but nobody has time to tackle it now.

You need more people - and you can afford them. So it’s time to hire, right?

Not so fast.

Just adding people without a plan is a recipe for disaster.

You need to be prepared to change the structure of the tech organization and introduce processes, and new ways of working.

It’s going to be difficult. People will resist this change. You need to create a new way for people to have a shared sense of purpose and intimacy under the new structure.

I’ll go into more detail on strategies that you can employ in the next email tomorrow.