2. Want to scale?
So you have a successful
Company / Startup.
Business is rocketing…
…and Engineering cannot
follow the speed of Business.
You need to scale!
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3. Beware of growing too fast
More bureaucracy
Less productivity
Worse product because of
bad communication
Breaking the culture
Cost and complexity
…tips and tricks to stay fit!
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4. Hiring
Build a strong Hiring pipeline
Formalize the process. Share and involve the whole team.
Empower the Hiring Managers. They are accountable for hiring.
Professionalize hiring: use tools to support it (ATS like Greenhouse)
Understand your current salary bands. Define appropriate hiring bands (also
based on market).
Be visible on the market and in tech community (blog, meetups,
conferences, open-source software).
Measure it and optimize it like a Sales/Marketing funnel
Top of funnel = sourcing
Conversion rate at each step
Closing the deal
Formalize and be disciplined
about on-boarding new hires.
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5. Growing the people
Scaling a team is also about growing the people.
Make sure every individual knows what it means for
them when the team gets bigger:
role, career evolution, opportunities of growth…
Especially if you hire senior people who will come in to manage
the existing teams
Set up a culture of Continuous Learning
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6. Management
Managers in Engineering teams are usually ex-Developers and are not
necessarily trained to manage.
Explicitely train them towards management.
Delegation: it is usually difficult for an ex-developer to release control on some
important pieces of code.
Time organization: it is very hard for a developer to start mixing his time with
management tasks
Differentiate Management and Leadership: Tech Lead is not People Management.
Invest into improving and scaling your management practices.
Put a special focus on practices that facilitate on-boarding and maintain
consistency:
Knowing each other (try tools like Personal Maps)
Team Culture (see next slide)
Team Building
1:1
Management by Walking Around
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7. Culture
Adding new members to a team can break the spirit of the team.
How do you define your team culture? What are your values?
Define your culture and values together as a team to use it as a
hiring filter.
Test for culture fit (which is not incompatible with diversity).
It is also a good opportunity to define team ambitions.
Are your teams happy? Harder to evaluate when you scale, so pay
attention to it.
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8. Team Structure
Split the teams: teams of small teams.
But figure out how to manage dependencies and align teams.
Define the team type that suits your context:
Feature teams
Platform teams
Hybrid teams
Avoid 100% component teams.
Visualize dependencies: avoid coupled teams.
Guidelines:
3 to 9 members in a team
Stable(ish), full-time, colocated
With a mission
Clear stakeholders/customers
Cross-functional
Autonomous
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9. Technical practices
A team cannot scale efficiently without strong technical practices.
Think automation and industrialization.
Think quality.
Think autonomy and responsibility.
How do you ensure that when going from a small team to a bigger team you
keep the same level of quality, of speed and reliability.
Must haves:
Continuous integration
Systematic code review
Automated tests (unit tests, functional tests,…)
Automated Build & Deploy mechanisms
Start reducing your Technical Debt
…
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10. Project Management
In an Agile environment, make sure you have good agile basics and team
structure before scaling.
You need efficient tools (and know how to use them collaboratively).
Minimum would be things like Jira+Confluence, or anything similar.
Documentation: organize your documentation so it can be used easily by
newcomers – reduce your Documentation debt.
When scaling Agile teams, you risk creating silos.
Add a Portfolio vision on top of your Agile teams to keep a high-level company
view and proper prioritization and cross-dependencies management.
Rethink how you slice projects
Scaling needs to happen
at Enterprise level
Stop Starting. Start Finishing.
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11. Communication
Enforce cross-team communications.
Scale the Feedback Loop
For instance a monthly team meeting where all the teams share their accomplishments and plans.
Shared Roadmap reviews
Multi-teams retrospectives
Also build opportunities for communication, by mix-and-
matching people from different teams:
Shared tech projects
Shared team initiatives (organization, management, team life…)
Organize regular team buildings and team life events so that
people socialize together: games (Lego4scrum, Marshmallow
challenges,…), meals (team breakfasts, drinks,…)
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14. We’re changing the world… one password at a time
Dashlane wants to make identity and
payment simple and secure everywhere!
Want to be a part of life in the Dashlane?
Visit dashlane.com/jobs for all the info!
Dashlane is a premier, award-winning password manager and
digital wallet, intrinsically designed to make identity and payments
simple and secure on every website and every device.
We’re a rapidly growing, tech startup using the world’s best security
and privacy architecture to simplify the lives of more than 3 billion
Internet users worldwide.
Since our first product launch in 2013, our brilliant team of engineers and developers tirelessly work on new coding challenges, build code using
the latest up-to-date frameworks for native development across desktop and mobile, use cutting-edge web service architecture, and are at the
forefront of building applications that help millions of people every day!
So far, all of our hard work has been paying off! Dashlane was recently recognized by Google as one of the “Best of 2015” apps! Google also
recognized our Android password manager as an Editors’ Choice winner on the Google Play Store, and selected Dashlane to demo its adoption
of Android M fingerprint technology at Google I/O!
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15. We work with the latest technology!
See our code in action! Check out some of our
projects on Github!
Github.com/Dashlane
In addition, each member of the Dashlane team can take some time to
share his insights in Tech Conferences and become a thought leader
in the tech community.
Alexis Fogel
@ Droid Con
Goo.gl/7h4guk
Emmanuel Schalit
@ The Dublin
Web Summit
Goo.gl/M4H7vg
Emmanuel Schalit
@ Le Wagon
Goo.gl/kvPLG0
Desktop Mobile Web App/Server Security
Dashlane is dedicated to building high-quality user experiences on Mobile, Desktop, and on the web using the latest up-to-date
technologies and languages.
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16. Ready to join #LifeInTheDashlane?
We’re filling our ranks from top to bottom with
some of the smartest and friendliest developers
and engineers in the industry! Come join us!
Visit Dashlane.com/jobs to learn more about
joining the Dashlane team!
Dashlane.com/stackoverflow
Dashlane.com/linkedin
Dashlane.com/vimeo
Dashlane.com/blog
Also visit us here:
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