Session summary

So you’re scaling your team? Congratulations! But while scaling can be an exciting time, it can also bring a lot of chaos. And without clear objectives and a strategy for achieving them, you run the risk of creating uncertainty, increasing ineffective communication and decreasing productivity. This session will help you navigate your team through this transition and take the necessary action to get qualified and experienced engineers on your team.

Takeaways from session 2 ‘Growing teams sustainably’

 You've learnt:

• How to be aware of the common pitfalls related to scaling teams in order to avoid them 
• Why it's essential to have a strategy and plan in place to deal with the potential issues when they arise
• To be knowledgeable about where you are today and intentional about where you want to get to and the path you're going to take 

You've discussed your current processes and the current support you provide. You interrogated what needs to change if you want to hire the people you've just spoken about AND set them up for success.

You should be able to outline what your ideal org looks like and then think about the personas of each of your new hires and what success would look like to them.

Homework

Think of your current team and how you'd like to grow it over the next eighteen months.

Outline the work that your team needs to cover: 

• Identify the skills gaps that currently exist in your team
• Decide how many people are required to fill these gaps

With this knowledge, draw what your ideal org looks like. Think about the mix of seniors and juniors, skills and specialities, and how your team may split if it is oversized.

Finally, write out the persona profile of each of your new hires. 

Outline their seniority, the skills that they would bring to the team (both technically and socially), and what their focus would be when they stepped into the role. Then write some bullet points outlining how this role would succeed at three months, nine months, and eighteen months.