Evolving and growing your teams for efficient product development

As your company grows, keeping teams and their development to scale can be a daunting task. 

Thankfully, there are meaningful and productive ways to keep these growing pains at bay and ensure everyone is coordinated in their development. 

Alan Boyce, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Sprout Social, Inc, joined OpsLevel Co-Founder and CTO Kenneth Rose on his podcast, Level-Up, to discuss how team building and evolution have helped increase product development at Sprout. We also explore how to effectively keep teams aligned in the development as a company scales in size, despite growing pains.

This blog is adapted from that conversation and covers:

• The traits engineering leaders have across every level of growth and scale
• Evolving product development from a single team to multiple teams
• Strategies used to keep teams aligned

Leadership traits of engineers across every level of growth

Not all engineers are prepared to serve in leadership roles — and that’s okay. But, according to Alan, there are a few traits that all great engineering leaders need to have to be successful across every level of growth within a scaling organization.

Strategies, systems and tools will vary between growth stages. Therefore, leaders must understand where their team and business are within growth stages to best determine which strategies will be most effective. 

In addition, Alan says strong engineering leaders will be highly adaptable.

“When scaling an organization, change is the only constant,” he says. “You have to be adaptable and willing and able to embrace the chaos of that.”

Throughout the scaling experience, there are often many growing pains. For example, products and needs will shift, teams will evolve, and roles will change. All of these changes also require leaders to have strong communication skills.

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At Sprout, most goal setting takes place on a team level. This empowers leaders to develop better goals that are more specific to their teams — in turn, strengthing collaboration and loyalty if communication is solid.

Evolution of product development from single to multiple teams

While Sprout Social provides a terrific example of leadership and team change through rapid scaling, their experience was far from flawless. “It required a lot of iteration as we found our way,” Alan says. 

As Sprout began to scale, the organization established various teams and developed a distributed system for product development. While the evolution was not easy, the work quickly paid off. Alan says, “That’s where it really took off for us. Once you have a dedicated team, magical things start to happen.”

Developing these teams and distributing roles and responsibilities fairly plays a significant role in organizational success during rapid growth. Leaders at Sprout decided on a non-traditional approach, allowing developers to choose the team they work on.

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Although they are met with hesitation from other organizations, Alan holds strong. “We don't want developers to work on something they're not excited about,” he says. “We spent a lot of time ensuring that our teams had compelling roadmaps and the right balance of janitorial tasks.”

When teams aren’t given an unfair amount of messy, tedious work, employees can be genuinely engaged in their work — especially when they get the opportunity to choose what they work on. 

Alignment strategies for teams

Breaking into multiple teams can be extremely beneficial for productivity. However, you must keep teams aligned and working in unison toward the business's goals. 

According to Alan, alignment can somewhat be characterized by problem descriptions. Once teams understand the problem at hand, they can each align to apply their own process to address the problem. While the teams may play different roles, they are all working towards a singular goal. This goal or problem statement must also be established up front and communicated across teams before they start moving forward.

“If you’ve already designed it, it’s too late for alignment,” Alan says. When you communicate before jumping into the design, teams can collaborate to share existing solutions and ideas. But communication doesn’t end here — it’s crucial across every level of growth.

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Communication is an art form that must be perfected, according to Alan. “You’ve got to repeat yourself over and over. It all goes back to repetition and storytelling,” he says. Everyone within the organization must be a part of the same story and understand how each piece of the puzzle fits so they can band together and make meaningful progress.

Did you enjoy the content? Listen to the full Level-Up episode.

‍To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to Level-Up on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or just search for Level-Up in your favorite podcast player.

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