Effectively leading your engineering team through rapid growth

Team leadership and technical leadership come with variety of challenges and require various skills. One of them is an insightful future outlook and being ready for what’s yet to come.

Working on a new project, or joining a startup – there’s an expectation for your team to grow. Growth is good. The more hands on board, the more you can achieve. But it’s not all roses.

In this talk we’ll look at challenges and risks related to the fast growth of an engineering and cross-functional team. How to notice first signs of the change? When to react? How to keep your team’s culture when growing? What will have to change, what can stay the same?

Summarizing past experiences – from bootstrapping a remote team from zero to 20 people, as well as growing DeepMind Health engineering team from 20 to 80 in a bit over a year – there are patterns emerging that can help other teams avoid pitfalls that come naturally with a rapid growth.

At the end of this talk you should be aware of what changes to expect as your team grows, how to notice critical inflection points, and react to them so your team comes out bigger and stronger.