Scaling Teams

Introduction

Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together.

James Cash Penney

Leading a fast-growing team is a uniquely challenging experience. Management techniques that seemed so effective last month can suddenly fail in surprising ways. The adjustments you make might carry you six months into the future, or maybe only six weeks. Meanwhile, your new team members have an increasingly difficult time coming up to speed, and you wonder whether all the effort you’ve put into recruiting might actually be slowing down the team.

Such experiences can be humbling, but they can also be thrilling and rewarding for those who successfully navigate the inflection points that come from rapid growth. Looking back on our own careers, we wish that we had been given a practical guide to those inflection points, to help us see the warning signs of dysfunction before they grew into full-fledged crises. Rather than pivoting rapidly in response to scaling problems, we’d prefer to have used proven solutions from successful companies, adjusting them to the unique challenges of our own situation. This book is the toolbox we wish we’d had, and we hope it proves useful to you.

Who Should Read This Book?

We wrote this book for leaders of technology companies, particularly those involved in product development: software and hardware engineering, product management, design, QA, and so on. Our advice will be most helpful to teams ranging from 10 to 250 members, either in the ...