How to Be an Effective Leader While Scaling Teams
16 November, 2018

VP of Engineering at Okta, Inc.
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: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scale-build-high-performing-engineering-teams-kickstart-bajaj/
Discover Plato
Scale your coaching effort for your engineering and product teams
Develop yourself to become a stronger engineering / product leader
Related stories
26 May
Elwin Lau, Director of Software at Jana, advocates the importance of maintaining culture within a company when scaling teams.

Elwin Lau
Director of Software at JANA Corporation
26 May
Elwin Lau, Director of Software at Jana, advocates the importance of maintaining culture within a company when scaling teams.

Elwin Lau
Director of Software at JANA Corporation
26 May
Hiring 10x engineers is hard for most companies. It’s a tough battle out there for talent. So how should most companies approach building their team?

Vaidik Kapoor
VP Engineering - DevOps & Security at Grofers
26 May
Philip Gollucci, Director of Cloud Engineering at CareRev, describes a new method for hiring in a market climate that favors candidates instead of recruiters.

Philip Gollucci
CEO/Founder at P6M7G8 Inc.
24 May
Jord Sips, Senior Product Manager at Mews, shares his expertise on a common challenge for product managers – finding root causes and solutions.

Jord Sips
Senior Product Manager at Mews
You're a great engineer.
Become a great engineering leader.
Plato (platohq.com) is the world's biggest mentorship platform for engineering managers & product managers. We've curated a community of mentors who are the tech industry's best engineering & product leaders from companies like Facebook, Lyft, Slack, Airbnb, Gusto, and more.
