Essential Guide to Scale Up Your Tech Team

Scaling is a part of the business growth cycle. As the business grows, it becomes necessary to expand the team within your organisation to maintain productivity. The need to scale your tech team, sales, marketing and others are driven by the pressure or ambition to serve more clients, build more features for expanding in new markets. As a growing organisation, you have to get your team ready to scale and create an environment for efficient work through proper communication. 

Knowing how to scale the teaching team efficiently is no easy task. There is always much more to consider than setting up more workstations. While scaling, changes beyond personnel may happen in your team. So, what are the ways to scale your tech team? A dedicated development team is more efficient than a newly assembled in-house one and it is feasible to help such a team to scale up. Keep reading to discover about the scaling of the software development team.

What defines a developer team that’s ready to scale?

The service company provides custom development to various businesses and the size of your tech team can provide more clients, and products accordingly. Be it in-house or outsourced, you have several options to scale the custom team. Then how to determine when the team is ready? Let’s see how.

Strong alignment

Being aligned with the company’s culture is one of the crucial things. With the company’s growth, it is difficult to scale your company’s culture. So, you have to make sure that the team along with cultural growth are on the same page and align each of them with different goals, priorities, and practices.

Knowledge sharing

The team should possess explicit knowledge that requires minimal work and should work around to share the same with new hires. The team should be able to use documentation and shared norms to transfer knowledge with new joiners.

Shared culture

Culture includes different knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement and creates a democratic environment that empowers everyone to ask questions. A team with shared culture can prove to be more productive and scalable in terms of having experience in different backgrounds.

Before you start considering the scalability of the tech team, there are a few key areas to consider. We have outlined below some elements to help with the scalability of your team, so revisit your vision and your values for the team's efficiency.

Ways to scale your tech team: A Business Perspective

The scalability of the tech team should be approached in a way that large businesses are considered as whole. Research suggests that scaling any business through values will give sustainable growth. If you scale business without integrating vision and values at core then there’s more risk of diluting your core message as an employer. According to Deloitte research, mission-driven companies have 30% higher levels of innovation and 40% higher levels of retention, so it is worth adopting a value lead approach for your tech team's scalability.

Specify the requirements

Before going in for the scalability ways, focus more on core elements of your business first. Without a clear and transparent vision of your business, creating scalable products might not be an easier task for you. If you are in the thought of not having any sort of issues or problems for the time being, it does not assure you that those issues will not appear down the road. Thus, it becomes very crucial to jot down all the possible core elements that are required from the very beginning of the planning stage.

Have your strategy and related metrics all sorted

You must have your business’s mission and vision. Matching your mission and vision statements determines your company’s product development strategy. And scaling your team must match with this strategy. You must understand “why” you are going to scale up from the strategic viewpoint. Lack of this understanding might lead you to wrong decisions and connected losses in the long run. Keep defined your performance metrics along with key performance indicators to monitor progress and to stay on the same page as your employee or teammates. 

Assigning the roles of Product Owner

Greater volume of projects comes with greater responsibilities. In other words, it is an effective and good idea to expand the responsibilities of the project manager to include a product owner as the number of incoming projects grows. Consider a product owner as a kind of “mini-CEO”. The additional control and responsibilities include finding ways to add value to your product for customers, analysing the market and leading to business growth. 

Keep your Tech Team independent and compact

Smaller teams are the basis of flexible team scaling. Though it is true that dividing workload into an independent unit will be fruitful, it makes no sense at all to create a separate team for a straightforward task. Having unnecessarily created independent units within a team will only create problems in communication and management which will lower the total productivity of your core business goal.

Having said the above, you should keep in mind that each team member must be all-round committed and accountable for the outcomes of the assigned task and the project. A small and effective team keeps people dedicated and focused, providing you with a fair idea of how they contribute to a common set of goals.

Optimising communication routes

The company’s growth and any changes related to the organisational structure requires a set of communication channels. Working with remote employees, it can be easy to lose information. Communicate clearly with your team members about vision and values throughout the period and it can create a big-shift with respect to your business perspective. Redesigning channels of communication so that each team member gets the required information quickly with minimal digital issues.

Along with the valid reasons for boosting the development team, you need to check-out a few prerequisites for the successful scaling which is listed below.

10 Prerequisites of successful team scaling:

Conclusion

Scaling a software development team will have an impact on your organization’s productivity. And when you need to scale your tech team, it is recommended to prioritize your team in the company over anything else. Just like another scalability, the team has to be justified, well-prepared, and processed incrementally. Leading your team through the growth process is extremely important but it is equally important to keep needs in mind for your team's scalability as it will impact your role as a leader. Tech team scaling is a process related to all the procedures taking place in the organization which shows how well-structured your company is and reveals the issues appearing below the surface.

Remember, that scaling your product development team can improve your abilities or expertise and become a business opportunist! Check out the Amplifyre OpenBench if you're looking for contract developers for your ongoing project. Developers can be filtered based on their roles, experience, and areas of expertise. Once you've found a developer who meets your needs, simply click the "Contact" button to get in touch with them and begin discussions.