The Engineering Leader

Chapter 10. Building a Bench

As teams grow, they hit different bottlenecks and limitations. The DevEx requirements of a hundred people are fundamentally different from the requirements for a few people, and those of a thousand are different all over again.

Similarly, the leadership requirements change as organizations scale. Small organizations may “not need managers” and have some flat structure where every engineer reports to the CTO and think it works. Invariably and inevitably, this structure will break down. It will break down for the first obvious reason of just how many direct reports one person can have, and it will break down for the less obvious reason that everyone, while in small, highly coupled environments, can know what is going on, at some point you cannot—and do not want to—onboard new people into a situation where in order to be effective, they need to know everyone and everything that is going on. And finally, it will break down because the profiles of people you will hire will necessarily need to change. Early-stage startups may value flexibility and scrappiness over skill and experience, but at some point, you will need to hire different profiles. You will need some different skills to scale backend services or to turn the basic app that validated product-market fit into a polished experience. Different people will want to join a team with 6–10 members than the people who want to be the first engineer (of that function, or period). Both types of people will ...