Maximize Team Impact with Minimal Growth

When an engineering team’s opportunities outgrow its capacity, the first solution many engineering leaders reach for is hiring. Yet many groups are constrained on how much they can hire. My leadership team recently discussed and debated this conundrum. What resulted is the following - our philosophies on staffing and other levers to increase impact without needing to hire more people.

Building a Thriving Team

Our overarching goal is to build thriving development and management teams. We start with defining our ideal state, as that provides direction and criteria for identifying any gaps in our existing teams.

A sufficiently staffed full-cycle dev team is able to:

• Exceed expectations on partner needs
• Invest in internal initiatives, for example system redesigns and tech debt reduction
• Explore new ideas and approaches, as wandering spurs innovation
• Operate our systems without burning out our people
• Advance the state of the art by sharing our tech stories via blog posts and conference talks
• Recharge through balancing time-off with time-on

A sufficiently staffed engineering management team is able to: 

• Create a psychologically safe, inclusive and thriving environment for their team and partners
• Stay current on their domain, in order to be a credible technical advisor to their team 
• Take time to understand one another’s people and domains, and offer advice that improves team outcomes
• Build relationship across the leadership space and contribute to the broader betterment through leadership and strategy discussions

Impact

As a technology team, we scale primarily through building solutions that work autonomously. We aim to design systems that can scale for the next 3-5 years, with an expectation that beyond that may require a re-architecture. Software-driven solutions provide leverage, so we expect that our people growth needs will be sublinear to the member and streaming usage growth (e.g., 2x usage with 1.2x more developers). Our value is determined by the impact we make, not the size of our team.

We aspire to provide leverage to our partners. By investing in efforts to more rapidly and effectively develop product features, we improve not only our own effectiveness but the effectiveness of our many partners too. This helps turn the leverage flywheel so more teams at Netflix can scale sublinearly to the business growth.

We aim to have enough headroom in our teams to flex without breaking when a colleague leaves or an important unplanned large project arises. Our goal is not zero pain, though; some pain forces us to consider other levers for impact.

Levers for Impact

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pahudson/10635491123/, no modifications made

Hiring is one large lever to increase your group’s impact, but it is one that is in limited supply. Consider which of the following levers you could pull to achieve scaling your impact without needing more people:

• Prioritization - there will always be more work we could do than time or people available to do it. Analyze the importance of all possible work and focus on the top tier. Say “no” gracefully to lower priority requests.
• Optimization - reduce the cycle time for important work. Reducing complexity and variation makes it easier to operate and evolve systems. Paying down tech debt helps increase developer efficiency and code quality.
• Innovation - discover novel ways to solve problems more efficiently and effectively. Some innovations eliminate entire categories of previous work, freeing up valuable space for our teams. Others create new categories that are much faster and lighter weight than previous approaches.

Deciding When & Who To Hire

Given hiring is one of our largest but most constrained levers, we should be rigorous in our approach to evaluating when & who to hire into our teams. We do headcount planning on a yearly basis and periodically check in on our needs versus our staffing plans to realign when necessary. We’ve found the following four steps to be helpful with planning.

Create margin to reflect: It takes time and clear schedules to think about your team, the direction, and how it relates to Netflix as a whole.  Before you hire, make sure you have created the time to think through your team’s future, how it should be organized, and what hire would make the difference.  Carve out the necessary space for this important deep work. That might mean shuffling your schedule, adjusting meeting frequencies, or skipping non-essential meetings to make space.

Think beyond incrementalism: It’s easy to be bogged down in the day to day and mired in your team’s current situation.  This also leads to thinking that the one extra engineer or extra manager will create all the time and space you need.  However, we have to think strategically. Ask yourself the focusing question: “what is the one thing (hire, redesign, tech investment, ...) my team can do that would make everything else easier or unnecessary?”. Stretch yourself to think in years, not months or days.

Complete the next best hire exercise: if you’ve concluded that hiring is a lever you’ll need to pull for your team, ask “what is the next best hire” to help focus your thinking. Doing so forces rigor and prioritization, by recursively guiding you through the exercise of what persona/experience/profile would add the most value.

Consider the diversity of your team: what skills, level of experience, or perspective is currently missing from the team that would be valuable to add.  Source candidates with the intention of adding those perspectives and experiences. 

Iterate & Adapt

This advice provides a foundation for how teams can increase their impact despite constrained headcount growth. Given the dynamic environment in most businesses today, expect that iterations and adaptations will be needed. If you approach the journey with a learner’s mindset, you’ll do great. Recall Netflix's CEO’s mantra from the culture memo: “We suck compared to how great we want to become”.

I’d love to hear what resonates with you and what you disagree with. Feel free to share feedback and questions in the comments section.