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Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?
41–50 of 85 posts
Re: Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?
#42Early employees often have difficulty with the new reality. In the early days everyone is involved in making product decisions, helping with sales by implementing features, doing support for customers. If you hired juniors this is all they know. Everyone doing everything is exactly what you don’t want in a larger organization. You need structure, you need dedicated teams for CX, product, development, QA, etc. Often e…
The obvious solution is to promote them. If you don't reward loyalty don't expect loyalty.
Re: Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?
#43Early employees often have difficulty with the new reality. In the early days everyone is involved in making product decisions, helping with sales by implementing features, doing support for customers. If you hired juniors this is all they know. Everyone doing everything is exactly what you don’t want in a larger organization. You need structure, you need dedicated teams for CX, product, development, QA, etc. Often e…
There’s a common scaling heuristic, related to Greiner’s growth model, that organizations need to fundamentally change how they operate as they grow. I recall numbers that every time your organization triples you need to change how you do things.
Part of this is communication overheads, and as op points out, the need, and ability, to specialise in a larger organisation.
Re: Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?
#44In a team of 10, you have 10 x (10 - 1) / 2 = 45 communication channels
In a team of 15, you have 15 x (15 - 1) / 2 = 105 communication channels
Which implies that the time you need to spend communicating would be around double. So if you need 1 hour meeting per day in a 10 person team, you will need 2 hours of meetings in a 15 person team.
The only solution that I know, however impopular, is to form a hierarchy of information, just like you would organize a growing code base in a hierarchy of abstractions.
Re: Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?
#45Early employees often have difficulty with the new reality. In the early days everyone is involved in making product decisions, helping with sales by implementing features, doing support for customers. If you hired juniors this is all they know. Everyone doing everything is exactly what you don’t want in a larger organization. You need structure, you need dedicated teams for CX, product, development, QA, etc. Often e…
The obvious solution is to promote them. If you don't reward loyalty don't expect loyalty.
But if you reward loyalty over skill then don’t expect skill to stick around.
Some people have 5 years of experience and some people have 1 year of experience 5 times.
Re: Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?
#46Having taken a startup from 2 to 100 a lot of the comments here resonate, but now that I'm in a company of 10,000 and trying to get things down across wide areas, I would say efficiency and communication overhead are all relative and make sure you're solving the problems in front of you and not "playing house" on problems you anticipate having down the line.
You will need more structure than you had before. For instance at 15 the idea of managers is silly, everyone still needs to be contributing individually, the only thing is that you do need to minimally subdivide work so that everyone isn't doing everything. Be wary of process for processes sake, you will start to need some but you really want to stay focused on concrete progress; is everyone doing the most important thing possible at every given moment? How fast are you shipping changes, closing sales, etc? Also make sure you have the right people, don't get starstruck by big tech vets. They have many skills that will be useful—if you are phenomenally successful—but if they don't have startup experience they likely will overengineer things by default, and a significant percentage of them can not wipe their own ass without the best-in-class tooling and infra support teams that allowed them to focus purely on one domain at BigCo. Basically you need pragmatic hustlers, veterans are good so long as they aren't cathedral or empire builders. Also watch out for weird team dynamics and nip any toxic interactions in the bud, one bad apple really can spoil the barrel; that's probably the most important thing to watch out for in the 15-100 range.
Re: Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?
#47Early employees often have difficulty with the new reality. In the early days everyone is involved in making product decisions, helping with sales by implementing features, doing support for customers. If you hired juniors this is all they know. Everyone doing everything is exactly what you don’t want in a larger organization. You need structure, you need dedicated teams for CX, product, development, QA, etc. Often e…
The obvious solution is to promote them. If you don't reward loyalty don't expect loyalty.
Not everyone is great at the level above and even if they are, sometimes it is not always a good fit for them. I've had more a good few engineers ask to go backwards when they've been promoted - each for their own reasons but nearly always around the theme of being in a position of leadership / seniority.
Re: Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?
#48Each sub-team (about 4 or 5 people?) must create and fully document the interfaces to their product(s). Otherwise you just have a big pile of something steaming.
Re: Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?
#49What breaks is always the weakest link, this will vary based on your own organization structure, it may be ops, it may be engineering, it may be culture, it may be management, but most certainly all of it will be tightly coupled to your communication.
Try and identify what is the weakest link, then avoid over correcting a symptom, double down on communication and ensure that your values, principles, and alignment are well understood across the org.
I really like 37signals as a reference guideline, build your variation of that and talk about it every day[1]
Re: Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?
#50Early employees often have difficulty with the new reality. In the early days everyone is involved in making product decisions, helping with sales by implementing features, doing support for customers. If you hired juniors this is all they know. Everyone doing everything is exactly what you don’t want in a larger organization. You need structure, you need dedicated teams for CX, product, development, QA, etc. Often e…
The obvious solution is to promote them. If you don't reward loyalty don't expect loyalty.
Indeed, with a big BUT: you don't want to overvalue loyalty in respect of competence. You don't want to have a boss that is not good but "is here since forever".
Instead, reward them economically. Everytime the company takes a leap forward, make clear to them that they were important for the process, and share some profit.
And make clear that being important in a moment doesn't automatically mean they will be important in the future: they will have to compete on results, like everyone else.