Scaling the cove.tool Software Team

Here at cove.tool we recently raised our Series B with a strong focus on growing the Software Team to quickly expand the product offering and venture into new markets. This rapid growth quickly tested the limits of our existing processes and team organization. We have since made key changes which have led to greater efficiency and productivity, which I will cover here.

Previous Structure

Even prior to the Series B we had seen steady growth to a team of 14, including Team Leads, QA Automation Engineers, Infrastructure, and Data Science specialists reporting directly to me.

We had a Backend Team Lead and a Frontend Team Lead each managing roughly half of the team from a sprint management, 1:1, and career growth perspective. Sprint management especially was taking up the majority of the team leads’ time.

The entire team attended the same Standup, Sprint Planning, and Sprint Retrospective. Standups were regularly at least 15 minutes, and Sprint Planning well over an hour. As a multi-product platform, many of the topics were not relevant for the entire team and it was difficult for everyone to remain focused.

Post raise, we hired an additional 7 Software Engineers, bringing the total to 21. It was time to pivot.

Current Structure

We decided to form 4 sub-teams, each focused on a specific set of products.

We then designated Tech Leads for each sub-team with the following sprint management responsibilities:

• Running daily standups
• Keeping sprint tasks updated
• Making sure all tasks are ready for the weekly release
• Assigning tasks and subtasks to other team members
• Attending product handoff/kickoff meetings to relay info back to the team
• Ensuring code reviews happen in a timely manner
• Surfacing blockers or issues to the Team Leads

We split up the meetings, Monday boards (for sprint task management), and Slack channels for each sub-team.

Each team’s Standup is 10 minutes max and hosted back-to-back — same for Sprint Planning every 2 weeks for 30 minutes max. A core group of Team Leads and QA Automation Engineers attends all the meetings.

The Retrospective is now hosted monthly with all the teams combined to ensure we are learning from each other and sharing process improvements. Weekly Tech Talks also continue to help with cohesion.

Conclusion

We have already seen greater efficiency in the day-to-day sprint work, clear communication paths between teams and with the rest of the organization, and each product getting the attention it needs from a dedicated group of Software Engineers. Releases are better coordinated with required sign-offs from specific people. Similar to the Agile hierarchy of epics, stories, and tasks, smaller teams bubbling up key decisions on a direct path to decision makers keeps the workflow streamlined.