Scaling Teams: Strategies for Building Successful Teams and Organizations

by Alexander Grosse, David Loftesness

Leading a fast-growing team is a uniquely challenging experience. Startups with a hot product often double or triple in size quickly—a recipe for chaos if company leaders aren’t prepared for the pitfalls of hyper-growth. If you’re leading a startup or a new team between 10 and 150 people, this guide provides a practical approach to managing your way through these challenges.

Each section covers essential strategies and tactics for managing growth, starting with a single team and exploring typical scaling points as the team grows in size and complexity. The book also provides many examples and lessons learned, based on the authors’ experience and interviews with industry leaders.

Learn how to make the most

Learn a scalable hiring process for growing your teamPeople Use 1-on-1 mentorship, dispute resolution, and other techniques to ensure your team is happy and productive Motivate employees by applying five organizational design principles Build a culture that can evolve as you grow, while remaining connected to the team’s core values Ensure that important information—and only the important stuff—gets through

Genres: Management, Leadership, Business, Nonfiction, Cultural, Reference

428 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 11, 2017

Reviews

[Mindaugas Mozūras · Rating 5 out of 5]

A perfect overview of organizational challenges for companies going from 10 to a couple of hundred of employees. Since it's a very broad topic, it doesn't go in-depth. But it has links to other resources, articles, books. Found many great insights, which I'll definitely refer to in the future.

[Saran Sivashanmugam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A practical guide for scaling software engineering teams from 10 to 100s. David and Alex speak from their experience about various challenges leaders and teams will face. The book is well organized in hiring, management, organization design, culture, and communications. I have not seen a technology management book recently that covers all these topics briefly in a book. A must-read if you're scaling your teams rapidly.

There are quite a few typographical errors in the last chapters giving an impression that the publishers rushed this edition. Also, this book has to be updated with a new revision on the new remote-first culture in the post-pandemic era. Many references to "work from days" as a means of slacking don't fit well with reality anymore.

[Ty · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty good how-to book for startup founders and leaders.
The authors have done a number of startups and they interviewed many successful and less successful founders and startup managers to come up with a list of common issues that startups run into as they grow. Each issue, from hiring to setting up a hierarchical organization to creating a company culture is discussed with a number of options described for dealing with the issue. I read this book on paper, but it looks like it would have been better as an e-book, as the authors include many URLs to other resources that look like they could be quite useful... I will have to type some of them in one day.
Highly recommended for anyone who is doing a startup today.

[Conor · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was recommended as something similar to 2 other books I recently purchased: The Making of a Manager & The Coaching Habit.

To be honest, I work in aerospace and this book does not apply to our industry…. It’s tailored around startups and technology companies, and potentially small entrepreneurial shops. The main focus is around Engineering Management, and transitioning from no/little process to medium/large process driven organizations.

The only portion that I could gain applicable knowledge from was on People Mgmt and the section on converting Individual Contributors to Managers.

This book was not helpful to me.

[Fernando Cristiani · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a good book that gives lots of practical advice on the challenges you might face scaling your team from a small startup to a bigger company. Has lots of references to the initial stages of a start up which resonated a lot personally.

None of the advices is really new or mind blowing, but it is useful to go over them again and see them all consolidated in a single book.

The book is extremely easy to read and has a nice cadence going from hiring, people management, organisation, culture and communication.

[Serhii Povísenko · Rating 3 out of 5]

Talks through five building blocks for scaling teams: hiring, people management, organisation, culture and communications.

The best part for me is about hiring. Made notes and bookmarks. People management refer to Andy Grove and Peopleware, I think the book adds nothing to that topic. Organisation — weak. Go for Team Topologies. Culture — also weak, go for Executive Premier by Larson. Communications, I mean who gets it right?

[Ricardo Hernández · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most insightful and complete engineering management book I have read. The book has five pillars: hiring, people management, organization, culture, and communication; each explained beautifully with concrete examples and with practical guidance to take the theory to practice.

Essential literature that will never get old.

[Craig Penfold · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really practical look at how to scale a company covering 5 different dimensions:

* Hiring
* People Management
* Organisation
* Culture
* Comms

Mostly there for smaller companies wanting to get big (eg from 15 to 150 people), rather than big companies wanting to get bigger (150 to 600 people), but still some great ideas in here.

[Vuk Trifkovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though there is a lot of common sensical / expected stuff the nuggets of insights make it really stand out. Side-box vignettes are top-notch and there are very useful checklists in tables.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very practical book. Great insight on how to form teams and improve communication.

[Max Winderbaum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good info, largely repetitive

[Felipe Peña · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great advice and experience from authors

Great advice and experience from authors. Lots of examples from companies and case studies from culture and people management issues.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good playbook for scaling, particularly hypergrowth scaling. I pretty much lived this book for 4 years at a previous employment.

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed this

I'd recommend this to leaders in growth organizations or consultancies. A consulting engagement is often just a ground hog day case of scaling teams.

[George Hipp · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great overview of full process of creating teams, from hiring funnels to when and how to scale everything, including communication, culture, delivery, reporting. This book provides options, gotcha's, plans and measurements for designs, testing and improving the organization of teams. As opposed to many books around engineering, which only push product teams, Scaling Teams provides pro's and con's around different strategies, which makes it much more helpful in the diverse, complex organizations we have today.

This book leaves you with data and options, but does not provide decisions. The information allows you to make deliberate decisions for your team and organization, track results and adjust.