Focus points when growing your Engineering organization

Twitter brought the talk from Kris Gale, VP Engineering at Yammer to me. Kris talks about his experience on how to scale an engineering organization from 2 people up to more than 30 engineers.

“Why Yammer believes the traditional engineering organizational structure is dead”, Kris Gale – VP Engineering

My take-aways:

1) Small interdisciplinary teams ship faster. True. Experienced on my own. Don’t specialize to much – let people mix and keep the team at a certain size.

2) Don’t organize yourself in specialized domains (e.g. back-end, front-end, middleware, …)

3) Let the experts make engineering decisions as soon as possible. This needs trust. Hire people who are more expert than you are. Let them decide and keep the process flowing – not allowing any pauses in the flow. The experts are ways better decision makers than managers.

“I don’t think you should be building a product. I think you should be building an organization that builds a product.”

4) Yammer build features with three core metrics in mind:

  • Virality (attract customer)
  • Engagement (retain customer)
  • Monetization (sell to customer)

All features have to improve one or more metrics. Otherwise they change the product for no reason.

5) The 2 and 10 rule. Yammer assigns 2 to 10 people and let a project run 2 to 10 weeks. All other attempts proved wrong and created failure.

6) Avoid code ownership. Everybody owns the code. No heros defending their great code.

7) People assignment works with a “Big Board”. Every engineer has a magnetic button “now” and “future”. The board has all projects listed. Every engineer is asked to put his “now” button on where he’s working currently and his “future” button where he plans to work next. This is great to improve transparency and needs the organization to FOCUS.