I am leading the engineering team for six months now. The company started post-pandemic, and the team has remained remote forever. The majority of the team members consist of fresh graduates.
Everything was running smoothly, and we hit an ARR of $1m on Mar 21.
With initial success, we doubled down and started increasing our team from 6 members to 20 members. It was when things started to go haywire.
Planning related
- Planned feature launches are getting delayed due to different reasons one by one.
- Everyone is DMing or sending a message on chats to get things done, causing untracked requests and added anxiety to developers.
- Unlimited iterations between CEO, technical, communication, and sales team.
- Debriefing the technical stack and getting developers onboarded is continuous trouble-causing offloading to newer members impossible.
Team issues
- Few colleagues feel they are not aware of the vision (documented in the wiki).
- Old team members are divided into groups and work in silos (technical, sales, operations, etc.), causing an environment of mistrust, no collaboration, etc.
- Degradation of product quality over time.
We have tried roadmap planning, standups, sprints, and CEO town halls to overcome a few difficulties.
I have an intrinsic feeling this might be more common in industry than we acknowledge. Unfortunately, I am lacking access to resources that can help in identifying clear patterns/reasons.
What will be your suggestion on tackling these troubles?
Does sound familiar, even with less than 20 people..
I think a product manager like person might help in this situation. Basically someone (on your team/or new hire) that understands both business and tech and has enough buy-in and trust from everyone to facilitate the communication between the silos and get everyone on the same page.
Besides managing, filtering, and pushing back on feature requests, they can create a solid product strategy so everyone can focus on achieving the same goals instead of just building features.
It's not perse a position of wielding power, more negotiating, balancing objectives and finding ways to keep things moving in the right direction.
But yeah, it's hard, scaling software development is not easy. But well, as long as you keep trying things you will find ways forward. Good luck!
RTFM (or W) is not a path that seems likely to produce a healthy culture among people at the start of their careers. And it seems even less likely when everyone is remote and institutional communications are additionally constrained.
The network grows as the square of its nodes. Yours went from 36 edges to 400.
Successful management requires seeing the world as "all good." There are always going to be problems. But it is the things that work that make the money. The measure of the product is not an abstract argument over quality. It is the money.
It's a business after all. Not an art school project. Not a club. Not a church with its bible as a wiki.
Good luck.