Together, We Can Scale Software Teams More Effectively

Fast growth is both exhilarating and isolating. From the outside, large fundraising rounds, ambitious hiring goals, and rapid user adoption seem exciting, but anyone who has scaled a high-growth software team knows how difficult it is.

Maybe this describes your software startup. Maybe you’re growing at a breakneck pace and you’re struggling to juggle the challenges of growing the team while also growing the product. When I talked to Wes Winham about his experiences scaling his last engineering team, he talked about the importance of his network. He had a tight-knit group of engineering leaders that he could have lunch with on a weekly basis. This community was the thing that kept him grounded, sane, and getting better every day.

Unfortunately, what he didn’t have was a resource dedicated to fast-growth engineering leaders. He longed for a digital watering hole where he could hear engineering leaders from all around the world come together and discuss the challenges associated with growing their teams.

We wanted to fix that, which is why we’re launching the Scaling Software Teams Podcast.

This podcast is dedicated to sharing best-practices from engineering team leaders who are navigating fast growth, primarily in the SaaS landscape. We want to make this the single best resource for engineering team leaders to learn how to handle the “people-side” of scaling their software startup or scale-up. We’ll cover topics like:

• How to attract the best engineering candidates in a competitive hiring landscape
• How to optimize your hiring process to avoid mis-hires
• Managing your own mental health, and the morale of your team, in the face of rapid growth
• Equitable managerial practices that will make you a better boss to everyone on your team
• How to get hired for your dream software engineering job
• And much, much more

Starting next Monday, we’ll be releasing new episodes every single week featuring an interview with an engineering leader who has navigated the fast growth of a software team before. I’m passionate about this project because I believe that by sharing these hard-won stories from the best startup engineering managers in the world, we can advance the state of the industry and make everyone a better teammate.

We can make the software industry better at hiring, retaining, and managing employees, which will lead to happier employees, which will lead to happier families and a more equitable world for aspiring software pros from all backgrounds.

If you share in this vision, I have three asks for you:

1. Please subscribe to the show on iTunes, Google Play, Soundcloud, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2. Leave a comment on this article about a topic you’d like to see us cover. Any questions you have about hiring or managing software engineers is helpful.
3. Tag an engineering leader (VP or CTO) of a fast-growth SaaS company who you think we should interview. We’re always looking for new guests, and your referrals will go a long way to making our show special. We're especially interested in finding folks who took a non-traditional path into engineering leadership or have hired from outside of the big engineering schools.

Thank you so much for your help. Let’s go build a better industry.