Varun Srinivasan
@v
How to ship fast as a small company looking for product-market fit 1. Avoid side quests. If you aren't coding, selling or talking to users, it's a side quest. 2. Eliminate process. Don't cargo cult your team into sprint planning, offsites or recurring 1:1s. Gather once a day, talk about what to ship and ship it. 3. Hire people who love to ship fast all the time. Most people cannot do this correctly or do not enjoy doing it. 4. Don't hire people who can't ship. It's temping to get an ea, bd rep or community manager to offload work. This usually just creates more work for you. 5. Have a simple and fast tech stack. A new hire should be able to write a feature in a day and deploy it to users in 30 minutes.
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jj 🛟
@jj
The hardest challenge having run 150+ eng teams is scaling this. At some point the problem isn’t are your engineers good, you cross a dunbars number and people are essentially strangers. You are basically throwing stranger together and asking them to work well. When that happens that’s when you start needing process because people don’t know how to talk to each other. Keeping process lightweight so that people remember it and will do it will be important. Culture is just really hard to scale unless you hire slowly over time and have really good retention. Then constantly removing process will be another battle because processes, policies and other BS starts creeping in and getting a life of its own. Engineers just love complexity or they think it’ll let them stand out. The best engineers I’ve worked with will be able to explain and execute highly complex systems but make it self evident and make it seem super simple.
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lightcap
@lightcap.eth
Scaling an eng team is psuedo-productivity. Almost always driven by outside perception of what it means grow a successful startup—typically VCs. IMO so few teams should be that big. I've yet to see teams bigger than 8-10 really ship. Even massive company wide individual teams should be no bigger than 8-10. The friction and institutional inertia that builds with any more outweighs any benefit of "scaling" an eng team.
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