4.14.40.140. How Engineering Management changes based on team size?
Tags: management, leadership
Published: 2023-10-15 06:38:32

It's not an IP address. It's not a random set of numbers. It's not longitude and latitude coordinates.

This is the logic behind the growth of leaders in Tech, which I see in my experience, the number of people he works with. At each new stage, the leader realizes that it is necessary to act differently, fundamentally different, and not just continue to do what was done before.

## Stage 4
You have between 4 and 13 people on your team, including yourself. You can hold the context of each person's work history, and performance, know his emotional state, and notice any changes. You can easily help him to solve some problems, and make a development plan. This is the stage of a "team as a family". The main task of a leader at this stage is to be able to see problems for every individual and help to solve them. Manually.

> You are like the captain of a soccer club, playing directly on the field. A mistake in your decisions can cost the team a match.

## Stage 14
There are between 14 and 39 people on the team. Someone will face this stage earlier. This is where you realize that you can't keep all the context from every individual and you need to switch more to processes. You are bound to forget something, catch something at the wrong time, miss something. 

First, you need help from your team members. People who know how to work with a small group, whom the team trusts as much as you. And teach that person to work 1:1 with people. Put him on stage 4. 

Also, you start to think differently about systematization, and processes. I'm talking not only about development lifecycle processes but people management as well.

**Communication**. How to convey all the information to the whole team so that they understand it correctly so that they can ask questions, and influence the choice of movement. Do it through peer managers? Information can be distorted, it's difficult. You still need to be able to communicate directly with everyone but rarely.

We need to strengthen horizontal communications, to do more events where people can communicate with each other. For us, for example, DevForum is such an option. It is a weekly tech meetup where developers share anything they want with a team.

**Interaction and processes**. It needs to be systematized, there are enough people, and some of them may not know what the other one is doing. You start thinking about how to make everything work as one big mechanism.

**HR**. There are going to be HR complexities. You need a system again, so that everyone understands where to grow, what the company, the teams, and the product needs. You don't work individually anymore. You still feel the direct impact of your actions on the product and other people. You are working from above, looking at the situation from the outside.

> You're a coach. You look from the outside, you see the process, you watch all the players and their interactions. A mistake in your decisions can cost a team a lost title in a season.

## Stage 40
Oh, boy. It's a different world, folks. You've got 40 to 99 people and sometimes you catch yourself forgetting the name of that one developer. Heck, it's scary, like I'm going to lose contact with people (I seriously caught myself 3 times thinking I forgot the name).

**More and more HR**. Salaries, growth, everyone's problems, you already need a people management structure (did you notice we already have 3 management jobs on the opportunity list?). Most likely at this stage you will start building a performance review process in order to promote the best people.

**Hiring**. You start to realize that hiring isn't just hiring. It's a way to grow competencies for your team. Lack of SRE competence – OK, it is easier to hire than teach.
 
**Leaders**. They grow, and you get people who can work at level 14. And you might not be able to count the people at level 4 anymore. They're the ones who manage communications.

**Decision Making**. You teach others to make decisions as much as possible and put them in a position where they need to make a decision themselves, without your participation. You can review but not decide. You feel detached from them, even sometimes you don't realize that your actions led to something right, because they were done a long time ago and there is no emotional connection.

You still influence the global development of the product, but your influence is different. You need to give people the opportunity to grow as much as possible. You know you would do better, but you can't because your guys have to grow.

> You're the general manager of a soccer club. You manage the strategy, you handle the transfers. A mistake will cost you a few lost years and a wrong strategy if you choose the wrong coach.

## Stage 140
**Vision and communications**
The two are together for a reason. Vision and company and team strategy are always there, the question is how they are discussed. At the 140-person level, communications change. One word you say is interpreted in a dozen different ways, so I am constantly choosing words and wording, only now a mistake in them is even more painful.
Vision has to be delivered 10 times to make it fit. We did Q&A sessions talking about changes in IT, more about structure, and long-term vision and strategy. Often everyone already knows about them, and at the event, I draw some kind of line, to describe the current situation and where we are going.
And then on to Q&A questions. Any, the most acute, anything that is of concern. Openly, without secrecy. We have 180+ people openly discussing ANY problems and influencing the way we build the company. The most recent example - a couple of questions on organizational and salary grid structure and we change them immediately.

**Decision Making**
More and more things let go that I used to be involved in. This includes hiring, reshuffling, team splits, and partly structural issues. Structure, by the way, it seemed like you could never let go of it, but no. If there is a strategy, if there is an understanding of how to productize the interaction, many details are already solved by the teams independently. Where there are contradictions, we change the top-level structure. I am still involved in these issues, but much less. It's cool, it's a testament to the growth of people, they can now make their own decisions and are increasingly moving to the 14 -> 40 level.

**Hiring**
I am only involved in spot hiring where I have to look for leads not at the team level but at the big product level.

**Is there anything that didn't change?**
By the way, yes, there are things that stay the same. Two approaches:
1. Be where the problem is or where you need to grow. This is the best way to prioritize work.
2. If you don't know who needs to do the work, stick it in yourself. A good way, to help you find holes in the structure, and areas of responsibility and articulate where new hiring is needed.