Scaling your tech teams

We worked with a San Fran-based tech firm with 3 million subscribers and $1.5 billion revenue, that was undergoing rapid growth.

The growth was causing two headaches…

1. As they increased the number of tech teams, the rate of product delivery was not increasing as fast.
2. #cloudcosts were growing faster than revenue, causing margin erosion.

The #CTO made two great changes to the culture and technology to fix this:

1. Provided visibility and ownership to all the engineering teams on their costs and performance.

Once teams could see this, they took ownership of their costs and performance.

2. Brought about a cultural change on using shared services.

The engineering teams were used to working independently. To build more efficiently, the CTO put in place common approaches for monitoring, logging & CI/CD pipelines.
This meant that teams could focus on product innovation rather than spending their time supporting different toolchains.

Often, non-scalable cloud costs are symptoms of underlying inefficiencies and poor working practices.

An underlying principle here is great tech performance = less capacity = less cost = highly performing teams.

What approaches have you used to #scale your tech teams?