How To Scale Your Product Development Team?

Are you ready to answer all these and other questions right away?

If no, this article will provide you with everything you should know on this topic.

If you think that yes, still keep on reading ‘cause we’re going to share some useful hints. And since we’re a start-up ourselves, we know what we’re talking about!

But before we move on to finding an effective way to scale a development team, let’s figure out when you may need this. Let’s get it started!

🗃️ The Most Common Cases When You Have to Scale Your Dev Team

There are many situations when scaling a product team is a necessary step to take. Is your issue on this list? Following cases by the Stormotion team will help you figure it out!

Case # 1: Your Startup Is Growing

This case is the most typical one for companies which develop their own product. Think of Snapchat or Waze, for example. Scaling in this type of companies often happens naturally and usually goes by the following scheme (very simplified):

1. Your Start-Up grows, its MAU/DAU and other KPIs are showing good numbers.
2. As the audience and the client base grows, the company has to constantly improve its product and work on new functionality even faster to stay competitive and don’t run out of funding.
3. The scope of the work grows together with the complexity of the product. The initial team doesn’t have enough time or expertise to take care of all the tasks.
4. That’s when scaling a product team takes place. The needed experts are invited to the company to fill the gaps and support a required development pace.

Also, by creating more teams, you will be able to re-assign the tasks between them according to their experience and expertise.

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So these were top 5 cases when expanding your team is reasonable. But how to scale your product team properly and correctly?

We’ll answer this question from 2 perspectives:

• development (or management);
• technical.

Let’s start with the first one!

⚙️ Development Perspective: Top 4 Points to Remember When Scaling a Product Team

# 1: Clearly Define What Goals You Want to Achieve

This is the first step you should take before scaling.

First and foremost, answer one question: what, in your opinion, do you expect to achieve by hiring new employees? There are many possible sub-questions that may occur in the process of thinking:

• Is it about increasing development speed?
• Do you need to improve some specific side (for example, marketing or QA)?
• Do you need to work on more projects at the same time?
• Are you going to extend your product to another platform?
• What specific issue do you expect to solve by hiring new team members?
• Or maybe you want to minimize risks when one of the developers leaves?

These were key development/management tips on how to scale your product team. However, this is only one side of this process. Now let’s review it from the tech perspective!

👨‍💻 Tech Perspective: How to Prepare Your Code for Scaling?

Code like you’re surrounded by idiots

This may sound like a joke but, actually, this rule should become your key principle during coding. And especially if you’re dealing with shared codebases!

Sometimes you will have to add new developers to already existing projects. And every developer knows that working with someone else’s code may be a quite tough task.

Stick to these tech tips by the Stormotion squad which we use to scale our app development teams. They’ll help to prepare your share codebase for use by other developers.

💡 Conclusion

So this was the ultimate guide on how to scale your product team by the Stormotion squad.

We gathered all our knowledge and expertise and tried to look at this process from 2 totally different perspectives:

• development (or management);
• technical (or coding).

We truly hope that you’ll use our tips to scale your software development team and they’ll help you a lot. Want to share your own hints? Drop us a line on Twitter!