You are either afraid or happy to be growing your development team, both are completely rational responses and emotions when considering this task.
You might be happy because your team is struggling, they are drowning in work, they need more bodies, new skills or maybe a refactor to what they are doing and how they are doing it.
Even if you are drowning, you might be afraid to add new bodies, inject new skills or refactor what you are doing because you have a really good thing going on with your current group and you don’t want to rock the boat or shift the balance
I’m going to do this as a series where I look to tackle each of these paths for growth — increasing headcount, adding extra skills, or a straight-up refactor.
Adding Bodies to the Team
When we think of growth, we tend to focus on people, bodies, headcount. It’s an easy metric because if your team is drowning in work, it can be simple — give them these five things and that prevents the rest of the team from being overloaded.
When I think of headcount, I think of a conversation I had with a Database Administrator when we used to manage our servers and we had to do performance tuning of our applications to see what we needed to do to make them perform well.
