It will get to a point during your tech startup journey when scaling your development team becomes the only way to go. Of course, bringing in new team members and cranking up productivity are pivotal to business expansion.
However, scaling is often a challenge, especially for software development companies. Mistakes are often made during this period of growth, and if you don’t scale your development team correctly, your business, finances, and user experience may take a hit.
As workload increases, it’s easy for things to fall apart as you lose focus. But you can avoid that by scaling correctly.
If you’re a tech company looking to leverage all the benefits of scaling, here’s how to scale your development team successfully.
1. Define your goals
Why are you scaling? This is the first thing you should ask yourself before trying to expand your business. It could be because you’re trying to develop a new product or improve an existing one, which requires more hands on deck. It could also be because you’re trying to expand your reach.
In either instance, the method and process of scaling would be completely different. In the first case, it would be wiser to outsource some tasks or collaborate with software development firm temporarily. That’s because you may not require the employees after completing the project.
If you want to expand your reach, you may need more permanent employees and even more branches.
2. Measure success
You may not know if you’re better or worse off if you do not measure success. While scaling your development team, it’s imperative to adopt metrics for measuring success, as this gives you an idea if you’re doing the right thing. The metrics will typically show if you’ve become more or less efficient.
Creating the metrics before scaling is also helpful as it gives you insight into where your productivity currently stands. This will highlight what areas need to be addressed.
3. Know how large you need to grow
It doesn’t always make sense to increase your team size from 10 to 100 employees overnight. While that may seem super elevating, it’s not always the case. There will be too many new employees to onboard, creating more management bottlenecks.
To determine the right team size — or if you even need an expansion at all, break down the project into stages and tasks. Then find out whether they can be comfortably distributed among your current team members or how many more hands are needed.
4. Create a better medium for collaboration
Improving collaboration is one of the most vital steps in scaling your software development team. Ten employees can be as fast as 20 if they have more efficient collaboration technology than the latter.
Choose a scalable collaboration platform that can allow new team members to adopt it easily. There are many project management tools, but ensure everything is well organized to get the best out of your team.
5. Hire the right people
Hiring newbies is not always wise when scaling a software development team, as you’d need time to train them.
It’s better to hire experienced people with the right skills that your growing company needs to avoid management headaches. Looking towards experienced developers or an offshore software development firm is an excellent investment at this time.
Finally, you want to keep an eye on your finances while scaling your software team, as you can quickly go overboard. Although expanding your company is an investment, you don’t want to be cash-strapped when other responsibilities or unforeseen challenges arise.
