Growing Your Team

There are two aspects to team growth: the growth of team members and the growth of the team itself by increasing its size. We’ve discussed team members’ growth in depth in the people management section. Here, we’ll focus on scaling the team. Engineering Managers spend significant time working on their team’s growth, hiring, and looking for new opportunities for the team. Growing teams have their own challenges, and effective managers need to understand these challenges and how to tackle them to ensure that their team scales well. Mentioned below are some typical questions asked about team growth during EM interviews.

How do you grow your team?

There are two ways to grow your team: organic growth and intentionally expanding the scope.

Organic growth: When the adoption of one of your products or services increases, you need to work on a larger scale. With more customers using the service/product, new requirements arise, and new operational issues start showing up. You’ll need more people to handle these added requirements and operational load. Also, if your products/services are doing well with respect to business, your senior leadership team will be happy to invest in you. This is organic growth. It is largely reactive, as you merely react to the changing demands of the product/service.

Expanding scope: This is where the manager intentionally helps the team expand the scope. Compared to organic growth, this type of growth requires managers to identify opportunities for under-invested areas proactively. For example, you see an opportunity to grow the business by investing in a new feature. You cannot dedicate existing resources to this area, as they are already working on existing critical projects. In this situation, you can make a case to the leadership to ask for more headcount allocation.

A manager should partner with their team leads and manager to find new opportunities to expand the team’s scope. Some guidelines for scope expansion are given below:

1. Look for the critical business problems that your team has the skills to solve and align with your team’s mission.

2. Fostering a culture of strong collaboration with XFN partners, customers, and other stakeholders can lead to new ideas and initiatives.

3. Making your team’s accomplishments, goals, and vision visible to leadership and other stakeholders can significantly help your team acquire new initiatives. Leadership should know your team’s core skills, capabilities, and capacity for new challenges.

4. Investing in the growth of individuals, particularly senior engineers, will always force them to think out of the box and be more innovative, bringing new ideas to the team.

5. The team should be bold enough to take risks and experiment with new ideas. Make sure they are not afraid of failure, and that team members can take on projects outside of their comfort zone. Of course, when taking such initiatives, they must bring you and the rest of the team on board.

6. Focusing on high quality, better engineering practices, and developer productivity, as well as making these efforts visible, can lead to new opportunities for the team.

An increase in scope will automatically lead to the need for more team members and team size expansion.

What are the challenges you faced when growing your team?

This question can be asked in various ways and sometimes include the initial team size and current time size. For example, “What challenges did you face when expanding your team from six to ten people?”

Each scale’s challenges are slightly different, but the basic principles remain the same. Growing team size does not mean a linear increase in productivity.

The first challenge in growing a team is finding new opportunities for the team, which we already discussed in depth in the first question. The next big challenge would be hiring the right people. Hiring engineers requires much effort, from screening candidates to onboarding them. Sometimes, this process takes months.

A fast-growing team has another big challenge of remaining productive during the growth phase. There is always some process overhead as teams grow. It is the manager’s responsibility to ensure that the team is scaling and growing. You need to make sure that the productivity is increasing (almost) proportionally.

As teams grow, there is a risk of reduced productivity. This happens if there is too much process overhead or time and resources are used to train new hires. In such cases, growing the team becomes counter-productive. As a manager, it is your responsibility to ensure that the team is scaling well and process overhead is minimum.

As a team grows, it can become more challenging to keep communication and collaboration effective. This can lead to misunderstandings, delays, and reduced productivity. It can also be more difficult to maintain a sense of unity when people start working on separate projects. This can lead to conflicts and a lack of cooperation among team members.

How do you ensure that the team is scaling well?

This question is similar to the previous one, with more focus on challenges in scaling. When a team is growing, existing processes may not be enough, resulting in more overhead and making the team less productive. You may need to change processes, and if the team becomes too big, create pods in the teams. Making sure to have an onboarding plan for each team member will be helpful.

As a manager, you should set clear goals and expectations for the team. Each team member should be aware of their role and responsibilities. Reward them for their success and hold them accountable for their failures. You must monitor and track the team’s performance and progress toward achieving the goals. You should look for any bottlenecks and inefficiencies based on the available data.

Make adjustments in the processes to address any inefficiencies and remove bottlenecks faster. Make data-driven decisions, and not decisions that are based upon a hunch. Yes, you should use your intuition, but only after you have the data. Don’t wait for 100% of the data. Remember that most decisions are reversible. You can experiment and see what works best for the team. Transparent communication and strong team relationships help team members adopt changes faster. When making changes to processes, it is preferable to make those incrementally instead of having very large and sudden changes.

For example, instead of a daily in-person stand-up meeting, your team has moved to an asynchronous scrum over a messaging platform to make it more flexible. However, in just a few weeks, they realized that in-person post-scrum discussions were very valuable. The team adopted a new process of having an in-person scrum twice a week and doing an asynchronous scrum for the remaining days.

Make people accountable and assign ownership to people, even if it is for small things. Let them be independent so they can drive their tasks, but at the same time, hold them accountable for what they have ownership over.

When the team becomes big enough, you must learn to grow through others. As your team grows in size, it’s essential to develop a strong leadership bench by fostering strong team and tech leads. Delegating some of your responsibilities to them can also help them grow and support the team’s growth. Building partnerships with these leaders can also help develop junior engineers within the team and in road mapping, strategy, and hiring efforts. Ultimately, a strong leadership bench within your team can lead to greater success.