Scale-Up

Cover image attribution: The bonsai pruning person illustration is an AI-generated artwork, created from a prompt. If your culture only works when twelve people are in the same Slack channel, it isn’t a culture. It’s a group chat with payroll. There’s a particular kind of magic in a five-person engineering team. Everyone knows everything. Decisions happen in the corridor. The codebase is small enough to hold in your head, and so is the organisation. Then you hire person number six, and the magic wobbles. By person sixty, the corridor has become a confluence of Slack channels, and somebody is seriously proposing that you “document your values.” ...

I was curious about the title - As your team gets bigger, your leadership style has to adapt. I am not Julie Zhuo, and I am not a Vice President of an organisation just yet. But as I started working at Kaluza, leading multiple teams, I felt like I had to evolve my leadership style accordingly too. The article was reassuring as I feel like I did get some things right. ...

Starting as an engineering manager As an engineering manager, you already have numerous responsibilities. At an early stage in your engineering manager career, you could even feel overwhelmed by the number of things you have to know. Some of them include Mentoring and coaching your direct reports who are individual contributors Setting strategic objectives for the team and the individuals Performance management - performance improvement programs Recruiting the right engineers for your team, squad, and organization Preparing promotion packs for your engineers Liaising with the people team to ensure benefits and compensation are attractive enough for bringing in new talent Working with Product and Peers to ensure delivery is smooth and dependencies are communicated and coordinated It doesn’t end there. ...