Scaling Developer Teams

Scaling Developer Teams: Know-How From Amazon, Facebook and Intercom - Interview with Rich Archbold

Software companies often hit hypergrowth, which means developer teams often suffer to manage scaling at the pace of growth and necessary workload. We sat down with Rich Archbold to pick his brain on how they scaled developer teams at Amazon, Facebook and Intercom.

Rich spent quite a few years at Amazon and Amazon Web Services, he worked at Facebook and he has been working at Intercom for over five years. He's currently the Senior Director of Engineering there. Interview by Karolina Toth in episode 3 of the Level-up Engineering podcast.

In the interview, we’ll cover:

• Challenges of scaling developer teams
• How to overcome them?
• First steps to scaling developer teams
• How to get hiring right?
• Common mistakes when scaling developer teams

What are the biggest challenges when scaling a software development team?

I'll start with the classic answer: it depends on the situation.

It depends on whether you're growing a small team; you may be scaling to split a relatively big team into more. When you split a team, or if you go bigger, such as scale the company by adding a new office, the old challenges won’t go away. You just get more scaling challenges on top.

You need strong fundamentals for scaling developer teams

The bottom line is, when you scale a team, you've got to make sure the fundamentals are strong. These are the mission, the vision, the strategy, the values, the culture of the team, and the metrics of success.

When you're looking to scale a team or split it in two, you need to figure out what these are going to be for the new team.

I ask myself these questions:

• “Can I paint a compelling picture of what the first six months of delivery are going to look like?”
• “What are the first six months’ worth of goals for the new team?”
• “Can I tell a story around what the new team is going to work on?”

Creating a story

When you have a mission, vision, strategy, values, and goals, and you weave them all together, it's a story.

Learn how to create your own company culture deck!

A story can align, excite and attract people, and keep them together when times get tough. It'll help them figure out their logo or what the fun things will be about the team. It’s a bunch of the challenges you need to get right but at the team level.

You need an employer brand

You need to know what your engineering brand is. Are you known for attracting people who are deep technologists or product people?

Maybe you attract young folks early in their career, and they're drawn to the growth opportunity because they know your growth trajectory is like a rocket ship.

Knowing your brand and being able to market it is super important.

Get hiring right

Scaling the team usually means adding people into the team. So, you need to hire people, and you need a good hiring system. Both experience and data shows that depending on where you are, hiring can be very competitive, so your engineering and your company need to know who you are.

You need a good interviewing process because it's difficult and competitive to get great people in the door to talk to you. It's an intense and costly process to interview people. You need well-trained people to do the interviews, to make sure not to over-index on technical competencies, and not to under index on attitude and culture competencies.

👉 Learn about Asana's developer recruitment process from this interview!

Avoid any bias

Make sure your process is not unconsciously biased giving you a poor mix of candidates. Even worse is having a good mix of folks coming in, but your unconscious or conscious bias shows up in your interview process and turns away some of your best potential hires.

Source: business.linkedin.com

To sum it up, make sure you have a mission, a vision, a strategy, values, and metrics, so you can turn them into a story.

Make sure the team has a level of clarity, at least for the first six months, so they can iterate from there.

Know who you are, make sure your brand is authentic, and know how to market it. The last thing is to get your interviews right to convert good candidates into good hires and to do so with a level of diversity.

What have you done to overcome these challenges?

Scale in sync with company strategy

Scaling your dev team is an action that you take directly following your higher-level company, product, or R&D strategy.

If you don't understand why you're scaling, and how it fits into your overall strategy, the team will have an identity crisis. Being clear on the big picture is hard, but at least figure out the next six months that you're competent about.

Here is what we do:

We review our company strategy every six months. We get all our directors and above together annually to talk through it. We do an open Q&A with our CEO, COO and our chief strategy officer. We give the people who manage the scaling an opportunity to have conversations with the top leaders, so everyone is clear on the strategy, and they can make the best decisions.

Scale holistically, be aware of dependencies

Most teams these days are multifunctional. You've got product management, design, research, engineering, analytics, and maybe some ops or some dev-ops folks. You want to make sure when you're scaling a team, you're scaling holistically. Discuss it with the head of design and the head of everything.

Make sure you understand what dependencies are required. You need strong checkpoints with cross-functional counterparts, with the folks in design and in product management in particular. So, make scaling decisions together and not in isolation. We check in on that on a quarterly basis.

Figure out what your values are worth

Figure out what your brand means to you and your company.

We have a value within engineering we call “represent Intercom with pride.” We make time and space for engineers to write blog posts or to give talks. If anybody pitches a talk at any conference in the world and is accepted, we will pay for their travel. That's part of our DNA and part of our brand.

We do very little contribution to open source, because that's not who we are. We're more a writing and speaking company. When I worked at Facebook, a big part of the brand was contributing to open source. That’s a key part of their brand, and they do a lot with that.

• You need to have a discussion with your engineering leaders and ask questions like:
• “What is your brand?”
• “What does it mean to you to be true and authentic to your brand?”
• “What do you want to be known for?”
• “Are you willing to have ten less features a year in exchange for fifteen blog posts?
• “Are you willing to use some of your budget for conference attendance?
• “Are you willing to make hard trade-offs?”

Be comfortable with who you are

If you want to be world-class, you need to be known for something.

You want to have an opinion, and be confident enough to say, “This is who we are. We know who we are, we think it's cool, and if it resonates with you, come join us.” The right brand attracts the right people and repels the wrong ones. They aren’t bad people; they’re great, but they are not the right people for your company at the time.

We went through a nine-month period where we had some tight deadlines on delivery, so we didn’t put effort into blog posts. I personally hadn't published anything on our main blog at that time. We saw our brand dip and we saw the amount of people applying to work at Intercom dip a bit too.

A hard lesson to learn was that the market doesn’t stay still. We're back to hosting a bunch of events, and we're putting on our own mini-conferences and workshops.

The challenge is having an authentic brand that is unique and putting fuel behind it. We've always known who we are, and we have been comfortable being different in a bunch of ways. It's fine if your company isn't defined by the strength of your engineering work; then, you don't need to hire the very best people. But if you build your brand on the strength of your engineering team, it’s essential.

Don't people want to land a job so much, they just act as you expect them to?

We all try to put our best foot forward when we go to an interview. As much as we think we're just trying to present our authentic selves, we do kind of tailor our answers to what we think the interviewer wants to hear. I think it's human nature.

Let your most experienced team members evaluate applicants

That's why you have experienced interviewers, your senior engineers and your HR team be part of your interview process. If somebody will be working on a cross-functional team, you'd have your engineers interview them, but you’d also have product managers and designers be part of the process.

A thorough interview process pays off

You might say this interview process is too long, there are too many people involved, or we ask too much with tests on top of it all. But we want to be thorough, since it's an expensive job for all involved. An unsuccessful hire hurts everyone in the long run, because you’ll likely end up parting ways at around six to 12 months. It’s not fun.

What are some of the mistakes you would warn against when scaling?

Hiring for hard skills alone

I would say the biggest one is not putting enough emphasis on hiring for behavior and attitude. It’s the most expensive one too. Understand the team you're hiring for and the balance you need to have in there.

The mistake we made in the past is hiring too many juniors. Unless you've got two seniors to match every eight juniors, you don't have a viable team. I call it guns and bullets. There's no point having a lot of bullets if you don't have any guns to fire them, or the other way around.

Hiring 10 junior engineers can reduce the capacity in your organization, because your best people who were executing at a high rate, now have to mentor juniors. It takes a lot of their time for about six to nine months, and the overall capacity takes a hit. Make sure you understand the balance of strengths in your organization, and you're not just thinking about adding people but strengthening the team.

Weak brand

I think of engineering as part of your differentiating value proposition as a company. You need a great engineering organization for your company to succeed, so you need great engineers. The competition is tough everywhere, so you need to invest into your brand.

You need to know who you are and let others know as well. Otherwise, your people will have six or seven juicier offers with a more compelling story coming from recruiters. As we get more competitive, the bar gets higher for your brand and story.

You need to have a uniqueness around your company and a reason why great people should come and work for you rather than working for Facebook, Google or Amazon. You better be sure they have a compelling brand to offer.

Conclusion

So, the key takeaways you can learn from Rich and Intercom are to be aware of who you are. Make sure you, your team and your company are all clear on the brand, then wear it as a badge, to raise awareness about your company and eventually get the right people onboard. Never lose sight of the overall strategy when managing your team’s inner workings.

Having a thorough hiring process is a must, as is interviewing for the most important qualities, which is attitude, according to Intercom. Be open, honest, inclusive and drop all the bias you can so you get to pick from the best people available.

Once you have all the main points down, you should be well on your way to being able to manage a strong scaling effort, and you’ll have much better chances for success.