Level-up Engineering The Ultimate Guide to Prepare Your Team to Scale
Interview with Joseph Gefroh, Engineering Director at HealthSherpa. He goes into detail about preparing a team to scale up. He shares his experiences and tells stories about what processes do you need to put in place, why they're necessary and how you can sell your teams on them.
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In this interview we're covering:
- Defining a team that's ready to scale
- The first challenges of scaling a team
- Improving knowledge sharing to scale your team
- Top processes to standardize before scaling your team
- Creating alignment in your team as you scale
- Story about standardizing communication channels
- Building management as you scale your team
- Introducing new management layers as you scale up
- Process to reiterate standardized processes
Excerpt from the interview:
"At one point, I was in a fundraising company that had no intake process. We had different functions, like finance operations, account management, sales, product, etc.
Whenever someone in a different department wanted something from engineering, they directly messaged an engineer or had a conversation with them in the office. The engineers usually agreed to help out, and the rest of the company took it as a commitment that engineering would get them what they needed.
This led to weird commitments that nobody was tracking and no one was working on. When the deadlines passed, the teams that made these requests got mad and blamed engineering for committing to help in the first place. The engineering organization turned into a black box, and from the perspective of the rest of the company, we were missing deadlines that we didn’t even know about."