Ask HN: How to scale teams in early stage startups?
I am leading the engineering team for six months now. The company started post-pandemic, and the team has remained remote forever. The majority of the team members consist of fresh graduates.
Everything was running smoothly, and we hit an ARR of $1m on Mar 21.
With initial success, we doubled down and started increasing our team from 6 members to 20 members. It was when things started to go haywire.
Planning related
- Planned feature launches are getting delayed due to different reasons one by one.
- Everyone is DMing or sending a message on chats to get things done, causing untracked requests and added anxiety to developers.
- Unlimited iterations between CEO, technical, communication, and sales team.
- Debriefing the technical stack and getting developers onboarded is continuous trouble-causing offloading to newer members impossible.
Team issues
- Few colleagues feel they are not aware of the vision (documented in the wiki).
- Old team members are divided into groups and work in silos (technical, sales, operations, etc.), causing an environment of mistrust, no collaboration, etc.
- Degradation of product quality over time.
We have tried roadmap planning, standups, sprints, and CEO town halls to overcome a few difficulties.
I have an intrinsic feeling this might be more common in industry than we acknowledge. Unfortunately, I am lacking access to resources that can help in identifying clear patterns/reasons.
What will be your suggestion on tackling these troubles?