case study 03 · team design
Scaling the team, not just the system
Most scaling stories are about systems: queues, caches, autoscaling. The harder one is the team. When delivery depends on one person being in the room, the ceiling is that person. My job as the team grew was to make myself removable, deliberately.
From 15 direct reports to a layer of leads
At its peak I led around 15 engineers directly across development, QA and SRE. That span works until it does not: 1:1s thin out, decisions bottleneck, and the team waits for the manager. The answer was not a flatter org, it was growing a layer of leaders.
I grew four senior engineers into Associate Engineering Manager roles, each owning a domain squad. Two of them did not initially want management. The work was months of sponsorship, not just mentorship: putting people forward for things they were not sure they were ready for, then backing them in public.
Teams as systems
I treat squad design the way I treat software design. Single responsibility: each squad owns a domain slice end to end. Clear interfaces: squads agree contracts with each other instead of stepping on each other. Loose coupling: a change in one squad does not ripple through everyone else. SOLID principles apply to team structure as much as class structure.
Conveyor-belt delivery
With domain squads owning their slices, work moves in parallel: each squad ships its own features on its own cadence, and the org sustains 8 to 10 releases per client per quarter without release ceremonies turning into events. The system keeps delivering while the structure changes underneath it.
Hiring and growth at scale
The same period covered 25+ engineers hired end to end: role definition, interview design, structured scorecards, calibration, onboarding. Retention held above 90% through a full reshape of the team for AI-augmented engineering, which is the harder version of that job: changing what the work is while keeping the people.
If delivery depends on me being in the room, I have built it wrong. The goal is a team that owns solutions and keeps shipping while the manager steps back.