How to scale a unicorn-building engineering team (and stay sane)
Building a structured game plan for empowering engineers can drive your team’s scaling
THE most common question I get asked by people familiar with my recent journey is: how the hell did you go from a team of 1 (Hi Dima!) to a 25-person engineering group (hey everybody else!) in under a year and a half?
The challenges we faced in the past year, like lockdowns, remote onboarding for new employees and hyper-growth struggles, can break down a company. Yet when you create fundamental habits that grow the individual capabilities, expanding the team isn’t just possible, it’s a natural progression.
We wouldn’t have made it very far without a strong game plan, and moving forward we’ve laid a roadmap that’s empowered 25 engineers to grow and take ownership, as well as lay the foundation for the next 50.
This is the story behind one of Melio’s engineering groups, and how we’re building one of the most world-class teams and changing the conversation about payments.
In this post, I’ll take a deep dive into our new team-scaling strategy step-by-step, from planning to execution.
Scaling unlocked
Engineering domains
Many engineering domains require your immediate attention while scaling. Different areas, like Monitoring, Onboarding, Testing, and more could be critical for your team in the long run.
What happens if you double down on Testing, but your Onboarding is a mess? What if your team excels at Knowledge Sharing, but has a clunky bad Dev experience? Your team’s growth will be messy and clunky as well, holding back your scaling in technical and cultural areas.
Since establishing strong foundations for the future is required, every domain is significant and relies on your team’s full commitment, planning and engagement.
So how can you expand all of your critical engineering domains at the same time?
Growth mindset
The answer: by enabling your engineers to lead and own your group’s level-up.
Engineers crave challenges and growth opportunities. They want to level up their skill set by having hands-on experience in best practices, planning and leading, while making a meaningful impact. Every engineer has the motivation and passion to make a difference in their preferred domain. You need to find out which one is it and unlock your engineer’s potential.
We did it by creating the appropriate game plan to enable it.
The game plan
Our game plan is a well-defined framework that enables task forces to lead impactful changes across all domains. How impactful? We don’t want to simply ‘be better׳, we want to research and set the highest standards, and make sure we empower our engineers to plan our way there.
Pairs of engineer and manager lead the task forces, according to the following steps:
Step 1: Map
What should you do:
Managers and tech leads perform a SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats) focused on future growth plans vs. current status. Group findings are split into different engineering domains.
What we did at Melio:
For example, one of the things that we were all concerned about in our shared SWOT analysis: number of engineers we’re planning to onboard and its impact.
What will the onboarding process look like when we onboard so many people? How will we share knowledge when we’re 30 people? How can we maintain a personal growth mindset when we’re 40?
We grouped these and similar items into Onboarding, Knowledge Sharing, and Growth domains.
Step 2: Define
What should you do:
Each pair leads to create one-pagers for each domain and define the following:
- Current status
- Problem statement
- Goals
What we did at Melio:
We asked our leads to pick the domains that were meaningful to them, and then to write one-pagers based on the basic template above. This could also be described as ‘Where are we at?’, ‘Where do we want to be?’, and ‘What’s preventing us from getting there?’.
We collected the one-pagers into a ‘Core Engineering Framework’ that we printed and handed out to the engineers.
Step 3: Assign
What should you do:
Pair engineers and team leads to guide task forces according to their domain preferences. Bonus: preferably pair non-direct reports.
What we did at Melio:
We didn’t know what their reactions would be before handing the engineers one-pagers.
Eye-rolls or Shrugs, possibly?
Nope. Their reactions were amazing.
Engineers reached out in the days after wanting to know more about the initiatives and even started to pitch their ideas.
We asked them to choose which domains they were most interested in, and paired them with non-direct managers as one designated task force for each domain.
Why a non-direct approach? We wanted to make everyone more accessible, learn different management styles and mentor & guide different engineers. As the team grows, having a great internal network within your team is important.
Step 4: Plan
What should you do, and what we did at Melio:
Grant each task force a month, with up to 20% designated time to create a structured plan, as follows:
- Research
- Internally: team, group, company
Reach out to different squads and departments, ask how they’re facing the problem you’re facing, what have they learned from their experience.
- Externally: Other companies
Discuss with colleagues from different companies. Networking and meeting other professionals is an important tool for engineers down the road.
- Resources: Meetups, blogs, books
Read. Listen. Learn. Now your team has the motivation to pause and start gaining knowledge to make sure you have the right plan.
2. Northstar
What are we trying to achieve?
3. Timeline and milestones
When and how are we going to achieve this? What can we expect to achieve by our first milestone?
4. OKRs
How do you define and measure your success? Survey? KPIs? Setting measurable goals and planning according to them are very important skills that engineers don’t usually practice.
5. Resource allocation
- Expense
Want to order a book? Sign-up for a course? Please do.
- Company functions
which company functions do you need to engage with? DevOps? Design? Reach out to the relevant people, get to know different departments and get connected. You don’t want Dima asking the designer for a favor. You want Dima to reach out to the Head of Design, presenting his plans and asking for resources. Make everyone more accessible, more professional.
- Engineering
How many engineering resources do you need to accomplish your work? It doesn’t have to be you doing all the heavy lifting. No one expects you to cover all the code with Testing, nor personally Onboarding any new employees. It just requires the right planning.
Step 5: Share
What should you do:
Document everything on your task force, share it and present it to everyone on the team.
What we did at Melio:
It could be key takeaways from courses you took, resources you read, companies you interviewed, the reasoning behind your plan. Everything. People will be more motivated and engaged in action items from all domains, once they understand the reasoning behind them.
If out of 30 engineers, 15 engineers read and eventually only 7 (Dima + 6) grow from reading your takeaways, it’s great. Multiply that by the number of completely different task forces, and think of all the knowledge your engineers will share, gain and grow from.
Now that’s amazing!
Step 6: Accomplish
What should you do:
Act according to your plan, make sure task forces are on track.
What we did at Melio:
Like any other project, you need to ongoingly check the defined OKRs, hold status meetings and make sure you’re making progress towards your north stars across all domains.
Managers are accountable for enabling and guiding the engineers they’re paired with, to make sure the group is expanding.
Engineers are accountable for making an impact by extending their skillset and ownership.
Now what?
This is our game plan at Melio. Your team can have a completely different approach, challenges, and more — and that’s great, but in the end:
- You and your team share the same challenges and vision
- You and your team are passionate about making an impact and growing
- You and your team should build and own the winning framework together
Engineers that won’t find challenges and growth opportunities in your team, will most likely seek them in their next workplace. Make other employees come to you for their next workplace.
That is why it is imperative to create an environment that makes your workplace the destination other employees come to for opportunities. The challenges, self-ownership, and the growth mindset that we enable are what engineers are looking forward to in a workplace.
It is this approach that helped our team not only survive but thrive, over the past year. If it weren’t for these incredibly talented people (hi team, I’m talking about you), we wouldn’t have made it so far, and together we’re taking our team to the next level!
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or suggestions.
