Scaling a Development Team

Read the blog post by Adam Wiggins. He talked about the experience at his company on how to scale a team. TL;DR is no silver bullet development model and the model shall change as the team size scales.

Stage 1: Homebrewing

• 2-4 guy working in a garage
• easy communication and coordination
• self-directed generalist working on everything
• single chat channel and single (unclassified) mailing list
• no need for bug-tracking, a complete picture of the project is in everyone’s brain
• target for minimum viable product

Stage 2: First hires

• 5-9 person
• ad-hoc coordination: overhear everything from each other
• iteration planning: start having Monday meetings, big to-do list on whiteboard, system for task-assignment
• bureaucracy is definitely counter-productive
• single chat channel and mailing list still works
• everyone is still a generalist, but have a common focused goal
• in search of a scalable business model

Stage 2.5:

• 10-15 developers, many startups have been killed here
• people start to spend most of their time on iteration planning and meetings
• bored to go through laundry lists of details on other people’s work
• need to break down one team into smaller target teams

Stage 3: Breaking teams

• the art: Draw the fences in the right place
• need a well-defined sphere of authority and clear interfaces to other teams
• a team should have maximum autonomy and have their vision and direction
• needs no permission or information from other teams unless a feature/bug across team boundaries
• shall have a product/market fit, and have found the company’s meaning for existence
• starts to appreciate specialization and specialists