10 Tips for Startups on Scaling Your Development Team

Startups tend to scale up their team when they observe longer sprints or missed release deadlines. However, it is recommended to scale a software development team only when it has every reason to believe that this investment will return ten times as much.

Other typical reasons include, but are not limited to:

• you have achieved product-market-fit
• rapid growth of the customer base
• growing startup KPIs
• you decided to build a mobile version of your online application or supplementary apps
• stakeholders set new goals that they want to implement as soon as possible, ahead of the competitors
• poor reviews of a company’s software and services and customers that never come back

The second issue is that startups may wish to scale software development because they fall short of prerequisites. For example, projects may lag due to poor management, and adding a task force to a late project would only delay it further. If a project is already bloated and challenged, it’s wise to decrease the mess instead of increasing the team.

Let’s list some of the common challenges of scaling the team:

• Calculating the ideal number of workers and teams for a project in advance.
• Complicated communication.
• Distributed teams management.
• The difference in cultures and values.
• The temptation to turn to micromanagement.
• Issues with the product’s architecture and/or codebases.

Our recent 10 Tips for Startups on Scaling a Technical Team article will advise overcoming these challenges and scaling a software development company more effectively. It also outlines when it’s reasonable to scale a software development team and the typical challenges in detail.