For those working at high-growth startups, things change rapidly. So much so that between office expansions, weekly crops of new hires and project launches, change can seem like the only constant.
But with all of that change, it’s important that companies look internally at what’s working — and what can be improved. We’re not referring to that new office decor, either. Instead, leaders should thoughtfully examine their engineering team structure, the heart and soul of what made their products catch on in the first place.
Shuffling up a team’s dynamics isn’t easy, though. To keep engineers excited about the projects they’re working on and efficient in delivering quality products, leaders have to be smart about what works best for their organization. There’s no clear-cut answer, but there are practical steps and helpful tips engineering managers can utilize to ensure big changes stay a good thing.
We spoke to Screencastify’s Engineering Manager, Marin Gutfeldt, and Dina’s VP of Engineering, Jay Riggins, to see how they successfully organized their teams to handle the continued growth they’ve seen over the last year.
Screencastify is a screen recorder and video tool trusted by teachers to aid in virtual learning and supplement in-class lessons. Each month, Screencastify helps over 15 million users record, edit and share videos.
When did you know it was time to reevaluate the structure of your engineering team?
After seeing a huge upswing in usage, we quickly hit critical mass for what our engineering team could handle. In addition, our revenue growth allowed for us to allocate more funding to our hiring efforts, paving a clear path for our department to grow.
How did you determine the right structure for your team, knowing that it would see rapid growth in the coming months?
With the rate we needed to grow, it was clear that we needed to split our department into smaller teams. After doing some research and discussing the needs of other departments, we chose the following structure: multiple product-based squads and a single ops squad. Each product squad includes an embedded product manager and focuses on a distinct product vertical. These product squads typically focus on a single feature project at a time. Meanwhile, the ops squad follows a looser structure, combining DevOps, site reliability engineering and security practices. Each functional role on the ops squad is mostly focused on their own projects.
With the rate we needed to grow, it was clear that we needed to split our department into smaller teams.”
What steps did you take to ensure a smooth transition to the new team structure? How did your engineers influence the process?
Our transition is still in progress! It’s an ever-changing process, and teams need to stay flexible as we adapt to whatever emerging needs arise. One of the most notable changes was to promote and hire engineering managers to lead the squads.
Having the engineering manager roles filled was key to coordinating experiments across squads, adapting what project management tooling we used, changing our processes and executing large-scale codebase shifts. In addition, we’ve had embedded engineers within other squads to share knowledge and expertise, and provide the extra legwork to ship key deliverables.
Dina is an AI-powered platform and network that aims to modernize at-home care. Through its virtual ecosystem, Dina provides a way for family and medical professionals to communicate, coordinate care and collect meaningful data on the health of patients.
When did you know it was time to reevaluate the structure of your engineering team? What were the biggest indicators?
As Dina embarked on a year of rapid growth, it became clear that we had grown too large to effectively support all the functions of our products with one team. As we thought about the best way to restructure, we considered each engineer's strengths and interests and then split the team based on our four different product initiatives. Our goal is to grow our team into specialists in every function so that we continue to deliver innovative solutions, and so every engineer has an opportunity to connect with our mission of improving care in the home.
Another indicator that it was time to change was the opportunity to create and release a new product, an SMS-based tool to help care teams remotely monitor people in their homes. As product adoption accelerated throughout the pandemic, our workload became more substantial than we anticipated. It forced our team to be honest about our skills and where we allocate our resources from a development and support standpoint.
What steps did you take to ensure a smooth transition to the new team structure?
Adding new developers and getting them up to speed was a challenge, particularly with those who were new to the industry and team environment. Innovation and scaling required using services and infrastructure from multiple cloud providers, while also iterating quickly on our solutions in-house.
Further steps Dina took to transition its engineering team:
- Assessed individual skill sets and provided training and documentation on the principles of its architecture.
- Worked with new team members to identify near-term goals to ensure everyone pushes the boundaries of their skills.
- Paired new engineers with seasoned team members to help them understand Dina's company goals and how to develop and ship products.
- Engineers joined customer-facing calls with the product team to better understand how products are used and where they can improve.
- Fostered learning and innovation by encouraging the team to build in time each week to work on what they are passionate about.
How did you determine the right structure for your team, knowing that it would see rapid growth in the coming months?
This year of growth helped us realize we needed to develop the next generation of technical leadership in our organization and build teams around them. For example, while I worked closely with leadership on the company’s infrastructure approach to ensure we could deliver quality solutions, we elevated our engineering leaders to become true subject-matter experts within our infrastructure.
This year of growth helped us realize we needed to develop the next generation of technical leadership in our organization.”
Once this process was set, we recruited talent who fit our immediate needs and company culture. We have hired engineers at every skill level and doubled the size of our team in the last six months. We continue to assess our team to determine how to best support everyone’s professional growth and deliver at a pace that keeps Dina at the forefront of the health tech industry.
Today, we are structured into product teams so each team is fully functional from top to bottom. Every engineer is responsible for an application, to ensure that it meets its needs in code for production. This responsibility encourages our engineers to tap into Dina’s value of compassion to better understand the needs of our end users, who are using our products to help keep people well-cared for in their homes and communities.
