Growing Pains: The Productivity Challenge of Expanding Engineering
Scaling up an engineering team quickly seems like a dream — just keep hiring more developers and accelerate product output, right? But experienced leaders know it’s never that simple. In reality, fast team growth brings big productivity challenges. Leading your engineering team through hypergrowth comes with growing pains.
It doesn’t matter if your team is ten, fifty, or a few hundred people — the problems are the same, but the scale is different. During the period of rapid growth, the key areas to focus on are communication, transparency, reducing technical debt, and upholding engineering culture.
Scaling Slows you Down
Growing that engineering team fast is a wild ride. Let’s say you triple the team over a year. It’s exciting to bring on so many talented people. The thought is that this would let you deliver features like never before.
Unfortunately, this is not exactly true. A year later, you notice that people from other departments keep asking why you’re not shipping faster with so many more engineers. It’s frustrating because everyone’s working hard trying to keep up.
After stepping back, you realize that productivity per engineer had actually gone down during this growth stage. There are a few things contributing to that.
First off, the code gets a lot less manageable. With more complex systems and technical debt, adding new functionality without breaking things takes longer. If only you could pause on features to do some refactoring and pay down that debt. That’s rarely an option, though.
Then, there’s the communication tax. With so many more cooks in the kitchen, making decisions and staying aligned gets harder. Context switching becomes a problem, too, as people get pulled into meeting after meeting. It’s a giant productivity killer.
And with more features comes more requests from users and data. Maintaining what you’ve already built gets tougher. Scaling infrastructure, improving features based on user feedback, fixing bugs, and performance tuning — all that eats up a ton of time.
So, while scaling up the team is great for hiring, you get slammed with productivity challenges. On the bright side, you learn a lot about pragmatism, team structure, and transparency. And that helps you push through the growing pains to become even stronger. It’s a wild ride for sure, but it’s so worth it.
Fixing The Perception of Slowing Down
When engineering team growth starts affecting velocity, an outside observer not involved in the development process may get a feeling that the output is slowing down because the team is underperforming. As a leader, there are several steps you must take to address this.
First, double down on refactoring and reducing technical debt through dedicated time in sprints. Improving code quality obviously doesn’t affect the perception positively in the short term. But ease of maintenance will boost productivity in the long run. Paying tech debt is an investment when scaling.
Second, keep the teams small and focused to limit organizational drag. Autonomous, streamlined teams with clear purposes will be more productive and motivated. Avoid letting teams balloon to an inefficient size. Again, this won’t change how people see your team, but will make you more productive long-term.
Third, communicate progress and accomplishments transparently through periodic announcements, regular stakeholder involvement, Q&A sessions with people from other departments, and and open and transparent discussions. Get ahead of any misperceptions by showcasing the amount of the actual work done so that everyone sees your team’s hard work.
Fourth, set realistic expectations on timelines and capacity with key stakeholders. Help them understand engineering tradeoffs to ground priorities in reality. Provide details on what your team is actually doing so that inner complexity and uncertainity is recognized by people outside of the engineering team.
A pragmatic approach to building, structuring teams, communicating clearly, and setting grounded expectations will help you manage how others see your team through the scaling period. When you bring the stakeholders into your reality, their perception will follow — being closed to development process products speaks louder than any speculation.
Growing Pains Are Normal
When engineering scales up, growing pains are normal. Some may think output is slowing, but let that discourage you. Have faith that you can rally through the challenges of growing teams with some smart moves.
Reflect on what makes your engineers awesome, and keep preserving that culture. Avoid knee-jerk reactions that could unintentionally hurt morale. Your engineers are likely still crushing it — make sure the rest of the company knows that.
Growth means evolution, but keep your principles in sight along the way. Stay pragmatic in building, keeping teams tight, communicating wins, and ground expectations. Growing teams is an opportunity, not an impediment. With your leadership and resilience, your engineering department will only get stronger.
