Scaling technology organizations is to align your teams on common goals and build a good engineering culture. Without alignment, every team will do their own thing. They will lead products in different directions, they will focus on different priorities, and they will ultimately clash against each other as they try to achieve conflicting goals. Anything that you can do as an engineer, a leader, or a business person to align your teams is going to magnify the momentum and increase the overall productivity of your startup.
When your teams are unaligned, they all pull in different directions. As a result, the overall direction of movement is undefined and uncoordinated. In comparison, by making everyone pull in the same direction, you magnify their strengths, as they do not have to fight each other’s conflicting interests. To align your teams more closely, you can start by developing a culture of humility, respect, and trust, where every engineer’s motto is that “we are all in this together.” To be a good team player, the benefit of the company should always come before the benefit of a team, and the benefit of the team should always come before the benefit of an individual. Whether you are a CTO, a manager, or an engineer, you can always influence the culture by aiming to work together, learning about others’ needs, seeking compromises, and trying to understand others’ points of view. A good engineering
culture is built on foundations of mutual respect, trust, and mindfulness.
Without a good culture, you end up in a vicious cycle of hiring ever worse engineers, getting bogged down with politics and egos, and fighting obstructionism. For people to be productive, healthy, and happy, you need to create an environment where everyone can feel safe and accepted, and where people get support from their peers. The good news is that it is in everyone’s capacity to ignite and foster a good engineering culture. You do not have to be a CEO to do this.
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