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In an early-stage startup, communication is straightforward. Because you only have a few people, you can make sure everyone is on the same page and pivot quickly.
But as the number of employees increases, communication pathways increase exponentially. Your company is no longer a small group of Individual Contributors – it is a complex structure with layers of management and cross-functional teams.
This is where some companies begin to struggle. Because it’s harder to keep everyone aligned, communication and culture can break down. This can prevent your teams from operating at maximum productivity.
Communication is only one of many complexities that growing companies face. So the real challenge is prioritizing solutions that bring the biggest impact to your developer teams.
There are several best practices that can guide your team through the challenges of rapid growth.
Today we’ll cover 4 tips that EMs use to avoid the pitfalls of rapid growth and scale:
When organizations undergo significant growth, they tend to focus on speed: how can we use our resources to pursue as many new things as possible? The reality is that understanding a new line of business takes time. If you spread your developers too thin, not only do you set new initiatives up to fail, but you also become less effective in the areas where you are succeeding.
Instead of expanding your scope prematurely, refine and narrow your focus on what works for you as an org. What are you doing well, and how can you do it better?
Most companies incur technical and organizational debt during early growth. Address these cracks in your foundation before they slow you down in the long run. Investing in fundamentals will improve your current product and set you up to scale at a healthy pace.
When it comes time to grow your product, let customer pain guide the next step. Pursuing a new partnership or revamping your UI might sound exciting – but is it addressing user pain points? You can avoid distractions and wasted resources by focusing on what your customers care about.
Hiring more engineers doesn’t automatically accelerate productivity. You need processes and practices that enable success – and methods of communicating them at scale. This is where onboarding becomes critical.
When managers fail to communicate processes and practices effectively, new hires can’t integrate into the company culture. This prevents individuals and teams from operating at maximum productivity. Unclear expectations inhibit developer growth and increase attrition, especially for developers from underrepresented backgrounds.
Your organization can’t grow if teams are working inefficiently and engineers are constantly leaving. Effective onboarding is one of the most impactful ways you can change these outcomes.
According to the 2022 Stack Overflow developer survey, over 48% of respondents regardless of function, think onboarding takes a very long time or a somewhat long time at their organization. Effective onboarding helps new hires ramp up and reach productivity quickly. This creates a lasting good impression of your company.
New developers need the tools to succeed quickly – without slowing down your most productive engineers. Stack Overflow found that for a team of 50 developers, the amount of time spent answering questions adds up to between 278-568 hours of time lost per week across the entire team. A streamlined knowledge management system can empower new hires and free up senior engineers to build faster.
Effective onboarding doesn’t stop once developers hit their productivity goals. It supports developers throughout their careers and helps keep them around longer. Growth plans enable developers to learn and update critical skills that will accelerate your product.
Boost productivity with precise developer learning.
Culture is a series of values, processes, and behaviors that drive your team towards a shared purpose. If you don’t take steps to scale your culture during rapid growth, teams can easily lose focus and motivation.
It’s important to define your culture early on through team working agreements and operating contracts. That way, when your company adds management layers, your culture can grow with the organization.
When your company hits 50 employees, roles such as the CEO and CTO should move away from IC work to focus on sending culture signals. As an EM, you can amplify these signals by:
To ensure developers can grow with your company, build a culture of continuous learning. Growth plans are a huge part of this. But it starts with creating a climate where people feel comfortable not knowing everything. When you model the growth mindset that you want to see on your team, developers will be motivated to learn.
Teams that rise to the challenge of rapid growth have one thing in common: an adaptable mindset. To build adaptability on your teams, consider the qualities you look for in hiring.
It’s difficult and expensive to hire high performers. On top of that, they won’t necessarily be willing to get outside their comfort zone. Instead of searching for top talent, prioritize solid candidates who are motivated to embrace change and wear a ton of hats. When you hire developers with a growth mindset, you can easily grow their skills through learning plans.
Effective leaders know that even for resilient developers, change can be stressful and demotivating. At Educative, we’ve found that the best engineering managers lead with people skills and business understanding.
When there is a change in scope or strategy, don’t just retask developers. Explain the business need behind the change and how it will empower developers to do their best work. Connecting daily tasks to a higher purpose will help developers to be agile as your company grows.
AI is no longer a “nice-to-have” — it’s part of how modern development teams work. From generating boilerplate code to writing tests or suggesting documentation, AI tools can significantly speed up workflows. But without clear boundaries, they can also create risks.
Here’s how effective teams are using AI responsibly:
Accelerate the boring stuff: Let AI handle repetitive tasks like scaffolding test cases, generating basic documentation, or suggesting refactors. This frees up engineers to focus on high-impact work.
Review everything: Treat AI-generated code the same as human-written code. Every suggestion should go through your standard review and testing processes.
Set clear guardrails: Establish a team-wide policy on what AI can be used for and when manual coding is better. Be especially careful with sensitive data and licensing concerns.
AI should feel like a teammate, not a shortcut. The best teams use it to boost productivity, not replace good engineering judgment.
As engineering organizations grow, one of the biggest challenges isn’t just writing code—it’s navigating complexity. Modern teams are solving this by investing in platform engineering and internal developer portals (IDPs).
A platform team’s job is to build “paved roads”—pre-built, secure, and reliable workflows that engineers can follow without reinventing the wheel. IDPs like Backstage or internal service catalogs make it easy to discover APIs, templates, and best practices.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Self-service environments: Engineers can spin up test or staging environments without waiting on DevOps.
Golden paths: Pre-approved templates and workflows make it clear how to build new services that meet organizational standards.
Centralized knowledge: Everything — from documentation to CI/CD pipelines — lives in one place.
By reducing cognitive overhead, teams move faster, onboard more quickly, and avoid costly mistakes.
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Effective teams don’t rely on vague notions of “velocity”—they use well-defined metrics to track progress, spot bottlenecks, and improve over time.
The two most widely used frameworks today are DORA and SPACE:
DORA metrics: Lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery. These focus on delivery performance.
SPACE metrics: Satisfaction, performance, activity, communication, and efficiency. These provide a more holistic view of developer well-being and effectiveness.
Some practical examples:
Measure onboarding with time to first PR and time to 10th PR instead of just “time to onboard.”
Track PR cycle time and review latency to spot friction in your delivery process.
Pair performance metrics with developer satisfaction surveys to ensure you’re improving outcomes without burning people out.
The goal isn’t to obsess over numbers—it’s to give your team the insights they need to improve sustainably.
It’s not easy to keep your dev teams productive and successful as you scale. The 4 tips we’ve shared today will help you to leverage every developer and retain them for longer.
One of the best ways you can implement these tips is through personalized growth plans.
Educative provides an interactive learning platform and hands-on resources that support developer growth at every stage of their tenure. You can:
In this section, we’ll cover how Educative can help you to scale productive teams and future-proof your organization.
Every new hire enters your company at a different starting point. With a one-size-fits-all approach, you can’t easily tailor materials to different learning needs and levels of experience. This lack of variability slows down the onboarding process and hurts your team’s productivity.
So what does custom onboarding look like?
From one central dashboard, you can:
Custom onboarding enables you to update multiple onboarding plans at once and tailor individual plans with low administrative effort. This means that you can maintain a high level of personalization at scale.
When developers receive personalized onboarding plans, they don’t have to waste their time sifting through resources that don’t apply to them. They get the information they need in the most efficient way possible. As a result, you can unlock the benefits of a larger team without slowing down more tenured developers.
Productivity is the goal and investing in an onboarding process that meets developers where they are at leaves a lasting impression on new hires.
Boost productivity with precise developer learning.
Scaling productive teams isn’t just about hiring. It’s also about maintaining a high level of skill and knowledge on your team.
Many of the learning resources available to devs are lengthy, video-based courses. But devs don’t have time to take full courses or scrub videos for necessary information.
Educative takes a developer-first approach with courses that are text-based, self-paced, and hands-on. This model has proven more effective than the lengthy videos often found on MOOC learning platforms.
How do Educative courses support developer learning?
Connecting developers with efficient learning experiences accelerates productivity. With more skills and knowledge available to them, developers can quickly adapt to new technology and additions to the tech stack.
When developers write better code, they’ll avoid unnecessary technical debt that can slow you down in the future.
The most innovative teams have a growth-minded culture that encourages developers to push themselves and take risks. One of the best ways to foster this mindset is to give developers opportunities to learn by building.
Creating full-featured technical projects allows developers to put new skills into practice right away. At the same, you don’t want these growth opportunities to jeopardize production environments.
Educative Projects eliminate this risk by providing real-world opportunities to build a tool. These projects provide:
Developers get the benefit of experimenting and building fully functional projects knowing it’s safe to fail and learn from your mistakes. Encouraging this mindset helps to create a positive culture that will scale with your team.
Projects also help you to connect your team’s work to a higher purpose. When you integrate experiential learning into developer learning plans, you immediately provide an opportunity to apply new skills to relevant projects.
As developers grow in their careers, you can add projects to personalized learning paths that align with their professional goals. This ensures that developers don’t waste time on irrelevant topics. Projects help create a roadmap for professional success and motivate developers to grow with your product.
