How do you scale an engineering organization?

Question

Accepted Answer

Scaling an engineering org is about **scaling decision-making, not just headcount**. As you grow, you must push autonomy down, structure teams around ownership, and replace informal coordination with clear interfaces.

## How to think about it

```text
AS THE ORG GROWS
- Structure teams around clear ownership (services, domains, products)
- Minimize cross-team dependencies (Team Topologies / autonomy)
- Add management layers only when spans of control break (~6-8 reports)
- Codify decisions: principles, paved roads, lightweight process
- Hire and grow leaders ahead of need
```

Conway's Law is real: your architecture will mirror your org structure, so design both together.

## Concrete example

Going from 30 to 150 engineers, a CTO splits a single product team into domain-aligned squads, introduces a platform team to provide paved roads, and promotes or hires engineering managers so no one has more than eight reports.

## Trade-offs and pitfalls

- **Pitfall:** adding people faster than you add structure and leadership (chaos).
- **Pitfall:** over-structuring early and killing startup speed.
- More coordination overhead is inevitable; the aim is to minimize it, not eliminate it.

## Why it matters

Most engineering orgs slow down dramatically as they grow, sometimes shipping less with more people.

Scaling well, by structuring for autonomy and distributing decision-making, is how some companies stay fast at hundreds of engineers while others stall.

It is one of a CTO's defining responsibilities.