How to scale a unicorn-building engineering team (and stay sane)

THE most common question I get asked by people familiar with my recent journey is: “how’d you go from a team of 1 to a 25 person engineering group in a year?” In this talk, I’ll share our plan as we lay the foundation for future engineers: a framework for empowering engineers to drive our scaling

THE most common question I get asked by people familiar with my recent journey is: ״how the hell did you go from a team of 1 to a 25 person engineering group in a year?״

We weren’t short on challenges this past year: lockdowns, remote onboarding for new employees, and hyper-growth struggles. Each of these can break a team on their own. But when you create and instill fundamental habits that grow individual capabilities, expanding the team isn’t just possible, it’s actually quite a natural progression.

Without a solid game plan wouldn’t have made it very far. And moving forward, we’ve laid a roadmap that gradually empowers those 25 engineers to grow and take ownership, paving the way for the next 50.

This is the story behind one of Melio’s engineering groups, and how we’re building a kickass, world-class team, which among other things, is changing the conversation around payments.

In this talk, I’ll take a deep dive into our new strategy step-by-step, from planning to execution: my structured game plan for empowering engineers to drive your team’s rapid growth in size, responsibility, and impact.

Overview

• Calibration: Mapping and sharing the team’s challenges and gaps
  • The feed-forward cycle of improvement for your team
  • Analysis process
  • Some examples
• Scaling unlocked: Choosing the right scaling strategy for your team
  • Establishing engineering domain foundations for the future
  • Different team-scaling approaches
  • Some examples
• The game plan: A comprehensive framework for building your team
  • Enabling your engineers to lead and own your group’s level-up
  • Step-by-step plan to lead impactful changes across all domains
  • Some examples

Outline

• Intro
• Different team-scaling approaches
• Engineers as leaders of your group’s level-up
• The game plan
  • A framework to lead impactful changes across all domains
  • The feed-forward cycle of improvement for your team
  • Analysis process
  • Mapping and defining the team’s domain challenges and gaps
  • Research, plan, grow and share knowledge
  • Measuring your success
• Takeaways

Gad Salner is a Group Manager at Melio, where he leads the development of their client-facing payment solution. With over 15 years of experience in development, Gad is an enthusiastic and innovative team player with a background in engineering, management, and architecture. He has a strong track record of leading product development in startups. His devotion to driving projects forward, creating a winning team culture and building awesome products has been his passion since the beginning.

Gad is also one of the creators of Kaduregel Shefel, a project capturing Israel’s cultural diversity through amateur football. The project produces exhibitions videos and events which they show around the world, and interact with the large community gathered around it. Gad attributes his unique blend of management methodologies to lessons learned at many different startups over the last 15 years, and from Kaduregel Shefel, where he ran a global cultural project. He had no idea just how incredibly useful this set of tools would be during a global pandemic. But c’est la vie!

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