University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Scaling Teams
Book

Scaling Teams

Strategies for Building Successful Teams and Organizations

Alexander Grosse and David Loftesness
O'Reilly, 2017
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8

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Your start-up company’s innovative software release proves hugely popular. To meet future demand, your little firm must scale up to twice its size. How do you find, hire and train more engineers who are as worthy and connected to your culture as your current staff? How can you ensure that your new people will fit in? High-tech start-up experts Alexander Grosse and David Loftesness answer these and other related questions to expansion. They explain what small tech start-ups must do to scale up quickly, efficiently and profitably. Their discussion focuses on five core issues that firms encounter when they grow, and not just software firms but many others as well. Those issues are: hiring, people management, organization, culture and communications. getAbstract recommends their helpful manual to leaders of technology firms, software developers, high-tech experts and all team managers.

Summary

Scaling Up

The successful techniques that leaders use to manage small companies and teams often don’t work when the company or its teams expand too quickly. This is a common problem for high-tech start-ups, particularly those in “hyper-growth” mode – that is, trying to expand more than 50% in six to twelve months. Without a proper scale-up plan, high-tech teams trying to integrate new members may become less productive at software development or whatever their assigned tasks are than they were before their team’s rapid expansion began.

Rapidly growing start-ups with 10 to 250 employees or smaller technical teams that quickly ramp up inside large, well-established organizations both may experience diminished productivity and difficulty with communications. The growing pains that hyper-growth firms typically encounter include disgruntled employees, morale problems, product snafus and unhappy customers.

The default solution to the challenges of expansion is to hire more people, but that may make things worse. Many managers of high-tech start-ups mistakenly believe that the best way to fix their problems is to hire more “individual contributors” (...

About the Authors

Alexander Grosse is vice-president of engineering at Issuu, a firm that specializes in digital publishing plans for companies. David Loftesness is a consultant for start-ups.

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