When you scale an engineering organization, you add teams. That’s obvious. What’s less obvious is what happens in the gaps between those teams.
You split the work, you give each team their own goals, their own domain. And each team starts optimizing for their goal. That’s what they’re measured on. That’s what they focus on.
But here’s the thing — the company’s goal as a whole? It starts getting neglected. Not because anyone is doing anything wrong. Every team is doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. And yet, collectively, you’re fighting yourself.
The more teams you create, the more gaps you create. And nobody owns those gaps.
This is something you need to keep an eye on. Adding more teams, more engineers — it comes with a cost. And to overcome that cost, you need to make sure people stay connected. Push teams to cross-collaborate. Success shouldn’t be just the team’s success, or an individual’s success — it should be the success of the company, the group as a whole.
Scaling up brings bureaucracy. That’s almost inevitable. But you have to actively fight against it. Stay connected. Keep collaborating across boundaries. Otherwise you’re just growing and fighting yourself at the same time.