Scaling your Dev Team

Greg Thomas
5 min readJul 10, 2023

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When your team is doing well, the questions that ultimately arise are — “Can you do more?” or “Can you fix this project?” or “What would you need to accomplish this?”

All those questions are rooted in scale and in replicating what you have done with your immediate team. This is a good problem to have and it’s great to be asked these questions.

Conversely, you might be looking at scale from another point of view — “We need to get these features out the door to win this client to keep the lights on” — the same problem, different reasons, maybe not the same emotions.

Whatever the origin, people want more.

Scale can mean many things to many people and when approached with this problem, it’s important to understand what the final goal it is you are trying to achieve (i.e., throwing more people at your team, doesn’t necessarily get the scale you might be needing).

For all the options below, I’m assuming a team of four developers and one dev manager.

Scale by Minimalism

“What can I take off your plate so you can do more on this?”

This is the best way to start scaling discussions because it’s through here that we figure out what might be holding you back to deliver more. Scale by Minimalism is the process by which our focus…

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Greg Thomas
Greg Thomas

Written by Greg Thomas

Software Architect, Developer, Author and Leader helping organizations build scalable software delivery teams and implement cloud-based solutions