- While There Is No One ‘Perfect’ Team Model, Experts From Five Fast-Growing Companies Agree That Flexibility Is Key to Weathering Organizational, Product Changes
Toptal, which operates a curated network of highly-skilled freelance talent with business, design, and technology expertise that allows companies to scale their teams on-demand, released its latest e-book, Architecting Scalable Engineering Teams. The publication features insights from engineering leaders at five fast-growing companies into how they structure, manage, and grow their teams.
For many CTOs and directors of engineering, building scalable and successful software engineering teams can be difficult, due in large part to competing pressures and responsibilities. In addition to managing a growing team, they are tasked with keeping an eye on overall business objectives and navigating the pressures of their leadership roles—overcoming technical challenges, motivating the team, planning for scale, settling disputes, tracking key metrics, and reporting to executive management—all of which require them to make countless vital decisions daily.
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“The structure of a team goes well beyond simply covering new tasks. It can actually help alleviate many management challenges,” said Taso Du Val, Founder and CEO of Toptal. “The experts we talked to agree that a singular ‘perfect’ engineering team structure doesn’t exist, but each of their stories illustrates a common thread: maintaining flexibility to weather organizational or product changes and solve problems as they arise.”
The e-book highlights five different team models, acknowledging that any given structure for success rests largely on an organization’s size, industry, and product:
- Three-in-a-box team leadership. ActiveCampaign, a customer experience automation software company, uses this model to increase team autonomy as its business scales.
- Stakeholder-focused squads. At Toptal, these squads are integral in building strong relationships between engineers and business stakeholders to ensure consistent delivery of business value.
- Front-end/Back-end split structure. Cube, a financial analysis and planning platform, employs two different leaders—one to helm the front-end team, and another focused on the back-end team.
- Satellite teams. At Cohesion, a cloud-based IoT company for smart buildings, satellite teams ensure rapid scale and eliminate the complexity of hiring, onboarding, paying, and managing each team.
- Function-centric engineering hierarchy. Valence, a community for the next generation of minority leaders, utilizes this model in which each engineering team reports directly to the CTO, who acts as both the engineering leader and the product leader.
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Across all five models, engineering leaders recognize the value of temporary help—whether it’s to build their teams or to add expertise that they may not have in house.
“Sometimes, a project needs to get done, but the leadership team isn’t sure if the increased capacity will be necessary in the long run,” said Marco Santos, Director of Engineering at Toptal. “That is why so many startups rely on talent networks like ours to augment their teams. When you have an extra load, it’s really nice to have an amazing network of talent that can help scale up.”
As the stories in the e-book illustrate, engineering teams differ from company to company and can change over time. Learning from other engineering leaders about what has worked and adapting those options to a specific organization or product situation can help ensure a smoother journey and deliver better business outcomes.
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