Dealing with Growth

A year ago, all engineers at ShopBack reported directly to the CTO. We had no Engineering Managers (EM), no team leads, and in other words — no structure. Recognising this as a rising issue for a start-up with a 250% year-on-year growth rate, we hired a VP Engineering to put a proper structure in place.

Introducing engineering managers was a paradigm shift he proposed which had an outsized impact on the engineering team.

We grew from:

• Zero to seven EMs
• One to three engineering centres
• Fifteen engineers to more than fifty engineers

The biggest game-changer for me was my role…