Scaling an Engineering Team

Want to scale?

So you have a successful Company / Startup.

Business is rocketing…

…and Engineering cannot follow the speed of Business.

You need to scale!

2

Beware of growing too fast

More bureaucracy

Less productivity

Worse product because of bad communication

Breaking the culture

Cost and complexity

…tips and tricks to stay fit!

3

Hiring

Build a strong Hiring pipeline Formalize the process. Share and involve the whole team.

Empower the Hiring Managers. They are accountable for hiring.

Professionalize hiring: use tools to support it (ATS like Greenhouse)

Understand your current salary bands. Define appropriate hiring bands (alsobased on market).

Be visible on the market and in tech community (blog, meetups, conferences, open-source software).

Measure it and optimize it like a Sales/Marketing funnel Top of funnel = sourcing

Conversion rate at each step

Closing the deal

Formalize and be disciplined

about on-boarding new hires.

4

Growing the people

Scaling a team is also about growing the people.

Make sure every individual knows what it means for them when the team gets bigger:

role, career evolution, opportunities of growth…

Especially if you hire senior people who will come in to manage the existing teams

Set up a culture of Continuous Learning

5

Management

Managers in Engineering teams are usually ex-Developers and are not necessarily trained to manage.

Explicitely train them towards management. Delegation: it is usually difficult for an ex-developer to release control on some

important pieces of code.

Time organization: it is very hard for a developer to start mixing his time with management tasks

Differentiate Management and Leadership: Tech Lead is not People Management.

Invest into improving and scaling your management practices.

Put a special focus on practices that facilitate on-boarding and maintainconsistency: Knowing each other (try tools like Personal Maps)

Team Culture (see next slide)

Team Building

1:1

Management by Walking Around

6

Culture

Adding new members to a team can break the spirit of the team.

How do you define your team culture? What are your values?

Define your culture and values together as a team to use it as a hiring filter. Test for culture fit (which is not incompatible with diversity).

It is also a good opportunity to define team ambitions.

Are your teams happy? Harder to evaluate when you scale, so payattention to it.

7

Team Structure

Split the teams: teams of small teams.

But figure out how to manage dependencies and align teams.

Define the team type that suits your context:

Feature teams

Platform teams

Hybrid teams

Avoid 100% component teams.

Visualize dependencies: avoid coupled teams.

Guidelines:

3 to 9 members in a team

Stable(ish), full-time, colocated

With a mission

Clear stakeholders/customers

Cross-functional

Autonomous

8

Technical practices

A team cannot scale efficiently without strong technical practices.

Think automation and industrialization.

Think quality.

Think autonomy and responsibility.

How do you ensure that when going from a small team to a bigger team youkeep the same level of quality, of speed and reliability.

Must haves: Continuous integration

Systematic code review

Automated tests (unit tests, functional tests,…)

Automated Build & Deploy mechanisms

Start reducing your Technical Debt

…

9

Project Management

In an Agile environment, make sure you have good agile basics and team structure before scaling.

You need efficient tools (and know how to use them collaboratively). Minimum would be things like Jira+Confluence, or anything similar.

Documentation: organize your documentation so it can be used easily by newcomers – reduce your Documentation debt.

When scaling Agile teams, you risk creating silos.

Add a Portfolio vision on top of your Agile teams to keep a high-level company view and proper prioritization and cross-dependencies management.

Rethink how you slice projects

Scaling needs to happen

at Enterprise level

Stop Starting. Start Finishing.

10

Communication

Enforce cross-team communications.

Scale the Feedback Loop For instance a monthly team meeting where all the teams share their accomplishments and plans.

Shared Roadmap reviews

Multi-teams retrospectives

Also build opportunities for communication, by mix-and-matching people from different teams: Shared tech projects

Shared team initiatives (organization, management, team life…)

Organize regular team buildings and team life events so thatpeople socialize together: games (Lego4scrum, Marshmallow challenges,…), meals (team breakfasts, drinks,…)

11

Questions

12

References

http://blog.crisp.se/2015/11/23/henrikkniberg/real-life-agile-scaling-agile-keynote

http://ethikonsulting.com/management-game/

https://management30.com/product/workouts/

http://blog.crisp.se/2013/03/14/henrikkniberg/stop-starting-start-finishing-my-slides-on-how-to-improve-your-life

http://fr.slideshare.net/betclicTech/betclic-training-continuouslearning

13

We’re changing the world… one password at a time

Dashlane wants to make identity and

payment simple and secure everywhere!

Want to be a part of life in the Dashlane?

Visit dashlane.com/jobs for all the info!

Dashlane is a premier, award-winning password manager and

digital wallet, intrinsically designed to make identity and payments

simple and secure on every website and every device.

We’re a rapidly growing, tech startup using the world’s best security

and privacy architecture to simplify the lives of more than 3 billion

Internet users worldwide.

Since our first product launch in 2013, our brilliant team of engineers and developers tirelessly work on new coding challenges, build code using

the latest up-to-date frameworks for native development across desktop and mobile, use cutting-edge web service architecture, and are at the

forefront of building applications that help millions of people every day!

So far, all of our hard work has been paying off! Dashlane was recently recognized by Google as one of the “Best of 2015” apps! Google also

recognized our Android password manager as an Editors’ Choice winner on the Google Play Store, and selected Dashlane to demo its adoption

of Android M fingerprint technology at Google I/O!

14

We work with the latest technology!

See our code in action! Check out some of our

projects on Github!

Github.com/Dashlane

In addition, each member of the Dashlane team can take some time to

share his insights in Tech Conferences and become a thought leader

in the tech community.

Alexis Fogel

@ Droid Con

Goo.gl/7h4guk

Emmanuel Schalit

@ The Dublin

Web Summit

Goo.gl/M4H7vg

Emmanuel Schalit

@ Le Wagon

Goo.gl/kvPLG0

Desktop Mobile Web App/Server Security

Dashlane is dedicated to building high-quality user experiences on Mobile, Desktop, and on the web using the latest up-to-date

technologies and languages.

15

Ready to join #LifeInTheDashlane?

We’re filling our ranks from top to bottom with

some of the smartest and friendliest developers

and engineers in the industry! Come join us!

Visit Dashlane.com/jobs to learn more about

joining the Dashlane team!

Dashlane.com/stackoverflow

Dashlane.com/linkedin

Dashlane.com/vimeo

Dashlane.com/blog

Also visit us here:

16