Scaling Engineering Teams Successfully and Without Wasting Extra Costs

There is more to scaling engineering teams than meets the eye. It’s a practice that goes beyond hiring additional in-house or offshore mobile developers, and into enabling new hires to adapt to the company’s application architectures. It’s also about ensuring development practices align with the company’s culture, establishing communication channels, setting metrics, building a flexible team structure, and many more.

And the importance of doing it perfectly and at the right time cannot be over-emphasized, considering that approximately 70% of start-ups that scale prematurely fail.

This article focuses on everything you need to know about scaling successfully. We will dig deeper into why it is the right solution for your business, sharing tips on how to scale data engineering teams.

Additionally, we will go further and give you a step-by-step scaling guide explaining how Newxel can help you find top-tier employees to scale up your business.

What is Scaling?

Scaling is putting measures and practices in place to grow your software engineering team, ensuring it meets the company’s changing demands. The process allows the team to develop more robust applications or services more cost-effectively.

Scenarios Where Scaling Your Engineering Teams is Vital

Team scaling is a practice that is not only appropriate for a startup looking to expand its team from 20 to 50 developers, but also for an enterprise considering scaling its engineering team from 100 to 500 developers or more.

The process is necessary if you are:

• A service company

A service company offers software development and other tech-related services to businesses. One excellent example is a company offering outsourcing services.

In this case, the service company must have enough hands on deck to cater to their clients’ needs. By doing so, they can continually offer impeccable services, establish their authority, and meet the growing demand for their services.

• A product company

As the name suggests, this is a company that develops products. In this case, the company needs the right-sized software development team and expertise to effectively and efficiently address the coding needs of clients.

Otherwise, the organization might miss the technical expertise to develop a robust application. Additionally, they might experience a slower time-to-market, giving their competitors a head start.

• In need of specific skill sets

If, for instance, you need to build a web scraping tool, you might be specifically looking for an employee who has mastered Ruby. Additionally, if you want a one-page application, finding a coder who understands the intricacies of Vue.Js is one of the best courses of action.

If your in-house team cannot produce candidates with specific talents and cannot minimize this skill gap through additional training, expanding through learning how to scale engineering teams is one of the best things to do.

Why Scaling Software Engineering Teams is the Right Solution in 2022

Scaling engineering organizations is an expansion strategy that many people in business are keen on, due to its numerous benefits.

Some perks that companies will enjoy after scaling engineering teams include:

• Ability to Handle Growth

Every entrepreneur dreams of growing their business. However, this will only be productive if team expansion is on your bucket list.

Scaling allows a development company to diversify its portfolio through building applications suitable for mobile and web platforms. That way, they can easily cater to the growing demand for their products and services.

• Positions for Your Business For Longevity

Scaling up engineering teams is not only about getting new hires. It’s also about building resilient systems that adapt to the organization’s changing needs and respond appropriately without downtime. With systems that operate optimally in adversity, your business is better positioned to last.

• Access to Special Skills

Onboarding additional development experts means access to specialized skills. With a bigger team, the business is better able to handle complex development tasks and ensure a faster time-to-market without compromising on quality.

IT team leasing is a recruitment solution that presents companies with a pool of developers who boast special skills. These tech experts bring in invaluable knowledge, sharing information on current tech stacks the company needs. By leveraging the information, the company gains a competitive advantage and stays relevant.

Scaling Engineering Team Process

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to scale engineering teams.

• Establish Hiring Goals

The first step to scale up the development team is to establish why you need more software engineers.

Has the company grown to the extent that the available talents cannot meet consumer demand? Do you have a complex project that needs specific skill sets that you currently cannot provide? Or do you want to expand to new territories?

Nailing down these details will help you have a clear vision, which is instrumental in steering you towards successful scaling.

• Recruit Talents

To recruit your organization’s ideal professionals, sourcing talents from the right sources is of the utmost importance.

Consider other recruitment platforms besides going through your company’s job application portal. For example, offshoring is one of the most effective recruitment sources to find highly-qualified tech specialists at pocket-friendly prices.

And to ensure efficiency in recruitment processes, continually measure each strategy’s success and make the necessary amendments if the need arises.

• Establish a Consistent Recruitment Platform

No ultimate recruitment platform exists, so establishing one that meets your hiring needs is vital. Once you find one that beats the organization’s recruitment challenges, use it to consistently bring in fresh tech talents.

Remember always to evaluate the platform to ensure it gives you quality hires. Your HR team and managers should also be adept at hiring, be able to quickly grasp the unique capability of each candidate, and understand the company’s recruitment best practices.

• Be Agile and Develop Leaders

Adopting an agile approach is crucial when learning how to scale from a small engineering team because it fosters individual interactions and focuses on working software and collaborations.

And while you remain agile, develop leaders. Ensure you assign roles, clearly stating each one’s responsibilities. After your leaders settle into their positions, they will oversee the entire team, letting you focus on other mission-critical tasks.

• Put the Right Technologies in Place

Make sure you have all technologies you need to streamline communication and development processes. This is particularly essential as it allows easier collaborations between the offshore and in-house teams.

Newxel can help you set up advanced collaborative and communicative tools you will need to scale successfully. We have a variety of tech products, and we will help you choose one that boasts capabilities and features your business oh so needs.

Challenges Most Companies Face While Scaling Their Team

GitHub, Stack Overflow, and AngeList are some of the great options for finding quality hires. However, even with access to top-tier talents, some of the engineering team scaling challenges you might face include:

• A Highly Competitive Industry

Previously, software development was confined to mission-critical tasks and massive transactional systems, but currently, it is essential to almost every business function. As such, the demand for developers is at an all-time high — and is only expected to rise.

However, with the 8.3 trillion talent shortage that Korn Ferry predicts, companies will have to scout deeper to find developers that would be their ideal fit. Even with the widening talent gap, companies must never cut corners but be more intentional in finding candidates that would settle in well with their teams.

While there are various ways to acquire top professionals, taking advantage of offshore vendors is one of the best. These companies have access to global tech hotspots and can help you find developers well-versed in your preferred tech stacks and whose coding expertise align with your company goals.

• Improper Techniques For Measuring Success

Unfortunately, some organizations will go in blindly when scaling an engineering team. As a result, they will be without a solid strategy for measuring team success, which jeopardizes productivity.

An effective solution to this challenge is to adopt proper success-measuring techniques. Use analytic tools to assess the number of commits, deployment frequency, lines of code, and pull requests. Embrace an all-rounded strategy that looks into the developer’s efficacy, job satisfaction, absence of bugs, quality of deliverables, communication, and collaboration.

• Working With Distributed Teams

Having an extended software development team is a surefire scaling strategy that allows entrepreneurs to tap into the massive yet affordable offshore tech talents. However, such overseas expansions rarely come without their fair share of challenges.

Collaboration, organizational, and communication bottlenecks are some of the most common hurdles companies face when they scale a remote engineering team. As a result, you may find different teams coding or debugging similar projects, a waste of productivity.

• The Time It Takes To Onboard and Integrates New Team Members

Hiring developers and immediately assigning them tasks is setting them up for failure: the same as expecting them to perform exceptionally well from the get-go.

Adapting to the new work environment and company culture might be confusing and intimidating, taking a toll on new hires. And since they do not want to appear clueless or uncomprehending, they will not be too willing to ask questions, impeding productivity.

So, business owners must realize that onboarding should be a systematic process and should never be hurried. It’s a process that requires careful planning, an excellent reason why leaving the scaling of engineering teams to professionals with a solid onboarding process is vital.

Key Tips For Effective Scaling

Here are tips that will ensure you scale effectively.

• Optimize Recruitment Process

Scaling software engineering teams might mean hiring overseas or from different locations in the same country. It also involves bringing in tech talents for diverse roles — from entry-level developers to specialists and consultants. As such, optimizing the recruitment process to suit the company’s unique hiring needs is paramount.

Arm the HR department with recruitment technologies that optimize recruitment. You also need to stay on top of recruitment trends, invest in your employer brand, create a talent pipeline and be open to leveraging the services of recruitment experts — if you are to have headache-free hiring processes.

• Invest in a Superior Quality Recruitment Team

Pay close attention to how well your hiring task force undertakes its responsibilities. An effective recruitment team is transparent and focuses on merit-based hires. By having a solid recruitment team, the chances of achieving consistent results rise significantly and it also boosts your company’s credibility.

• Merge Coding and Mentorship 

The best way to train new hires is by allowing them to work on critical projects, pairing them with other seasoned developers. That way, they hone their skills, get mentorship from other coders, and share their knowledge.

As a result, you save time and resources and allow new hires to familiarize themselves with the company’s culture and codebase.

• Encourage In-House and Remote Collaboration

For a successful scaling process, all team members must work as one. For starters, make sure all teams use the same collaboration platforms. Also, ensure that they communicate on the same platforms.

For instance, avoid scheduling meetings separately and have a zoom meeting that includes both in-house and remote developers. Additionally, encourage face time between members of both teams for better collaboration.

Scale Up Your Software Engineering Team With Newxel

Newxel is an outstaffing company and your reliable scaling partner. We can help you find on-demand skilled tech professionals, thoroughly train them within a few weeks, and integrate them with your in-house team.

Our talented recruitment team understands that no two businesses are alike. Hence, they focus on providing tailored services, delivering tenacious developers ideal for your unique development needs.

We have extensive experience in offshore talent recruitment, boasting access to a vast talent pool of professional developers well versed in almost all tech stacks.

Additionally, we help brands set up R&D centers and provide branded workspaces with advanced IT infrastructure. We are also experts in account management, financial, legal, and HR services.

Allow us to scale up your company successfully and without much hassle.

Contact us today.

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