How to Be an Effective Leader While Scaling Teams

Problem

"As a leader in any organization, it's important to figure out your business, value proposition, and competitive needs. If you want to have a high-performing engineering team, this all needs to be applied to your team as it, and the organization, grows. Throughout my professional journey, I've learned a lot about growing strong teams."

Actions taken

• Scale the team outside their current skill sets. And when failure comes with new tasks, embrace it.
• Take every opportunity as a learning experience. Accept the challenge.
• When you are doing things right, there will always be a bit of chaos. That's okay.
• Over communicate, especially when you have distributed teams across multiple geographies and time zones.
• "Culture is the promise you make to your employees. Brand is the promise you make to your customers." Be transparent, and create a culture of trust and shared accomplishments across the teams.
• Drink your own champagne for the latest version of the product.
• Maximize the "golden hours." Golden hours are when you have the most overlap between time zone differences. Rotate the meeting hours across time zones.
• Look for the potential leaders in your team who can lead smaller teams. Then, scale up in terms of communicating, planning, and coordinating.

Lessons learned

"Scaling an organization is a skill. Until you do it, it's hard to have a feel for it. I have lived through this every day in my job and have been learning as I go along. The most important thing is being uncomfortable in a comfortable situation. This will keep you up and running. You will keep scaling your teams in terms of growth, skill set, and innovation."

Source: LinkedIn