THE most common question I get asked by people familiar with my recent journey is: ״how the hell did you go from a team of 1 to a 25 person engineering group in a year?״

We weren’t short on challenges this past year: lockdowns, remote onboarding for new employees, and hyper-growth struggles. Each of these can break a team on their own. But when you create and instill fundamental habits that grow individual capabilities, expanding the team isn’t just possible, it’s actually quite a natural progression.

Without a solid game plan wouldn’t have made it very far. And moving forward, we’ve laid a roadmap that gradually empowers those 25 engineers to grow and take ownership, paving the way for the next 50.

This is the story behind one of Melio’s engineering groups, and how we’re building a kickass, world-class team, which among other things, is changing the conversation around payments.

In this talk, I'll take a deep dive into our new strategy step-by-step, from planning to execution: my structured game plan for empowering engineers to drive your team’s rapid growth in size, responsibility, and impact.

Overview
Calibration: Mapping and sharing the team’s challenges and gaps
The feed-forward cycle of improvement for your team
Analysis process
Some examples
Scaling unlocked: Choosing the right scaling strategy for your team
Establishing engineering domain foundations for the future
Different team-scaling approaches
Some examples
The game plan: A comprehensive framework for building your team
Enabling your engineers to lead and own your group’s level-up
Step-by-step plan to lead impactful changes across all domains
Some examples

Outline
Intro
Different team-scaling approaches
Engineers as leaders of your group’s level-up
The game plan
A framework to lead impactful changes across all domains
The feed-forward cycle of improvement for your team
Analysis process
Mapping and defining the team’s domain challenges and gaps
Research, plan, grow and share knowledge
Measuring your success
Takeaways