Scaling an engineering department from mid-size to large comes with a whole new set of challenges.
At this stage, structure, processes, and leadership become even more important to keep everything running smoothly.
So, getting this right is critical. And you’re in the right place to learn how to do it.
We’ve recently written a guide on how to set up and scale your engineering department, from a small team all the way to an enterprise-scale organization.
This is a companion piece focused on the large department stage, where we’ll break down how to organize your team, refine your processes, and set up your department for long-term success.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
Here, a strong hierarchy and detailed processes are crucial. You need structure to keep things moving in the right direction – and save yourself a lot of headaches later.
First, we’ll start with how to hire the right people and set up the right structure for your engineering department.
As your team scales, you need good leadership.
At this stage, you need to hire engineers who don’t just excel at their technical work but also have the potential to take on leadership roles in the future.
Look for candidates with strong communication skills, mentorship experience, and the ability to take ownership of projects.
Previous leadership experience, whether as a team lead, tech lead, or mentor, is a good indicator that they can step into more senior roles when the time comes.
Hiring for leadership potential now will ensure a smoother transition when you need to introduce more management layers, promote team leads, or expand your teams.
And scaling is much easier when you already have the right people in place.
At this size, ad-hoc hiring just won’t cut it.
To meet demand, you’ll need a structured recruitment and hiring pipeline that will allow you to continuously bring in top talent.
Here’s what a typical hiring pipeline looks like:
source: In-Recruiting
Work with HR to establish a dedicated recruitment team that will proactively source candidates instead of just waiting for applications to roll in.
You also need a strong outbound hiring strategy. It should include:
This way, you’ll ensure a steady flow of high-quality candidates.
And that will make it much easier to fill key roles without slowing down your growth.
Attracting the best engineers isn’t just about salaries and perks – it’s about building a reputation as a great place to work.
Investing in employer branding will help your company stand out in a competitive hiring market.
So, how do you do it?
You want to highlight your company’s culture, growth opportunities, and impactful projects across various channels:
A strong employer brand will increase inbound applications and make hiring easier
On top of that, it will help you retain the talent you’ve already invested in.
And that’s why it’s a good investment.
Scaling quickly means you will bring in a lot of new hires.
And you need to make sure they integrate smoothly into your existing teams.
That’s where a 30-60-90 evaluation plan comes into play.
It will help you set clear expectations and track new hires’ progress during the crucial first three months.
Here’s what each phase should focus on:
A structured approach like this will help you support new hires effectively and identify any red flags early.
It’s the best way to objectively evaluate if they’re the right long-term fit.
When your team grows, hiring consistency becomes a challenge.
So, to ensure fair and high-quality hiring decisions, create a pool of engineers and train them to conduct technical interviews.
Having a structured group of interviewers will help you:
This system will ensure all candidates go through a uniform, high-quality interview process.
And that’s key to maintaining standards as your team grows.
As you ramp up hiring, you’ll be tempted to rush the process and fill seats quickly – but that’s a huge mistake.
Poor hiring decisions lead to inefficiency and high turnover, and that will ultimately slow you down more than hiring carefully.
In hiring, slow and steady wins the race.
And to maintain hiring quality, you need to:
Hiring fast might solve your immediate needs, but hiring right will set your team up for long-term success.
Clear and consistent job descriptions are key to ensuring transparency in hiring.
They help both your current employees and new hires fully understand your expectations and their growth paths and responsibilities.
Here’s what you should clearly define when writing them:
Standardization job descriptions will make your hiring process smoother and help your team see a clear path for advancement and career growth.
And that’s key if you want to build a high-caliber engineering department.
It might sound basic, but top engineers expect top-quality equipment.
And providing them with the right tools isn’t just about comfort – it’s about productivity.
Investing in the right tools will boost their performance and help you create a better work environment.
You need to make sure everyone on the team has:
Poor equipment will slow your team down, lead to frustration, and increase your turnover rate.
And that’s something you can’t afford to let happen.
As your department scales, managing it as a single large team becomes impossible.
You need to break your team into smaller, semi-independent pods or squads if you want to stay agile.
Ideally, each pod or squad should be cross-functional and have all the skills they need to handle their domain without depending on other teams.
But, the key here is picking a team pattern that best fits your needs:
Work with your team leads and senior engineers to choose a pattern that best suits your needs.
When you have multiple teams working on different projects, valuable knowledge easily becomes siloed.
And if your teams don’t share it, they risk missing out on best practices and falling behind on new technologies.
So, to prevent that, you should introduce:
This cross-team learning will improve everyone’s technical expertise and improve collaboration across the entire department.
And that’s exactly what you should want.
If every small change needs approval from higher-ups, your team will quickly get bogged down.
To keep your team agile and efficient, each pod or squad should be able to independently make decisions about their day-to-day work – within your company guidelines.
This includes decisions about their roadmaps, the tools they use, and day-to-day workflows.
Having autonomous teams come with a lot of benefits, like:
Also, giving each team autonomy will build a culture of trust and responsibility across the entire department.
Your team will feel invested in the success of their projects rather than just following top-down orders.
As your department grows, remembering who has what expertise becomes much harder.
And that’s why you need a centralized knowledge base of your team members’ technical skills, past experience, and soft skills.
But, why is this so important?
Having a detailed skills knowledge base will help you:
This will ensure you’re using the talent you have effectively and efficiently.
And that’s key to long-term success.
At this stage, keeping your top talent is just as important as hiring.
Losing key team members can slow down projects, impact team morale, and create knowledge gaps.
To keep your best people, you need to be flexible with ranks, compensation, and growth opportunities.
But don’t focus only on the top performers – your entire team should feel valued.
So, if you adjust compensation or seniority for some team members, you should also consider:
You need to balance recognition for your top performers while also being fair to the rest of your team.
And that’s how you’ll keep your entire department motivated and committed to long-term success.
Next, we’ll cover the top SDLC, communication, and performance tracking processes you need to implement.
When you scale to this level, you’ll need defined DevOps processes.
Otherwise, inconsistent deployment practices and ad-hoc infrastructure management will cause major bottlenecks that can slow your work down to a crawl.
Here’s what a typical DevOps workflow looks like:
source: Devico Solutions
You need to clearly document every process in this workflow and ensure each team follows the same best practices.
But, why is this so important?
A strong DevOps foundation will reduce deployment risks, improve cross-team collaboration, and ensure every release is smooth and predictable.
And that’s key when you’re quickly scaling your department.
Poorly-coordinated handovers are often major bottlenecks during development.
They slow everyone down and cause unnecessary rework.
Luckily, if you optimize them, you can avoid this entirely.
You need to make sure that each transition, whether from architects to designers, designers to developers, or backend to frontend engineers, is a collaborative effort.
Here’s what you should focus on:
If you have a smooth, well-structured handover process, your teams will work more efficiently together.
And that will help you avoid blockers and last-minute surprises.
At this stage, microservices start making sense.
When your department grows to about 60 people, or 6 teams/squads of 10 people each, that’s when you should start introducing them.
It’s a common misconception that they’re the best solution right from the start.
Giants like Facebook and Google mainly adopted them to better manage huge teams, not because they offer superior technical performance.
But, at this scale, you’ll truly start to reap the benefits of independent development and deployment.
Your teams will be able to work autonomously without stepping on each others’ toes, which is why this is the sweet spot for adopting microservices.
“The bottom line is, you shouldn’t rush into microservices. Start with a simple monolithic architecture and transition when it’s truly necessary.”
Mario Zderic, co-founder and CTO at DECODE
Microservices aren’t a silver bullet.
Still, at this stage they can improve development efficiency and reduce bottlenecks – but only if you time the transition right.
Your team leads should always be on the same page.
If they aren’t, issues that can be solved quickly might spiral into larger roadblocks that derail everyone’s work.
You need to introduce weekly or bi-weekly team lead syncs where they discuss:
As a leader, you don’t need to attend every meeting, you just need to ensure they happen consistently.
These meetings will ensure your teams solve issues quickly and efficiently while also being a learning opportunity.
And that’s why you need them.
Your department doesn’t work in isolation.
Your team’s work directly impacts sales, marketing, customer support, and other departments in your company.
And if other departments aren’t aware of upcoming changes, this can lead to confusion and missed opportunities.
So, you need to hold regular alignment meetings with key stakeholders from each department to:
These meetings will keep everyone else in the company informed and allow them to prepare without scrambling at the last minute.
And that’s key if you want product launches and updates to go smoothly.
At this stage, detailed documentation is non-negotiable.
With multiple teams working on different parts of the product, assumptions and verbal explanations aren’t enough – everything needs to be clearly documented.
Expand your documentation to include:
Good documentation will speed up onboarding and troubleshooting and improve cross-team collaboration.
It also prevents teams from reinventing the wheel if they face similar challenges.
By their nature, larger teams have more complex workflows. And that means more opportunities for inefficiencies to creep in.
So, to stay on top of team performance, you need to introduce advanced KPIs to get deeper insights into your team’s productivity.
Some key metrics you should track are:
With these metrics, you’ll get data-driven insights into bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and your team’s overall performance.
Just don’t focus too much on them.
For example, if one team is working on a major new feature and another on small updates and fixes, the latter will have a higher deployment frequency.
But, that doesn’t necessarily mean one team is more efficient than the other.
So, to make the most of these metrics, always look at the bigger picture and context.
If you’re not careful, your teams might lose sight of the bigger picture and your company’s broader goals.
That’s where quarterly objectives and key results (OKRs) come in.
OKRs will help ensure every team’s efforts contribute to your company’s overall vision.
Each quarter, set measurable goals for each team, such as:
Regularly review progress on OKRs and adjust them when necessary – there’s no value in sticking to outdated goals if your priorities shift.
Even the best team won’t deliver great results if their morale is low.
Burnout, lack of recognition, or unclear career progression can quietly damage productivity and your retention rate.
And that’s why tracking team satisfaction is just as important as tracking technical KPIs.
Some ways you can measure team morale are:
If you spot any morale issues, you need to act quickly – whether it’s adjusting workloads, improving career development opportunities, or providing a better work-life balance.
A motivated team is a high-performing team, so you need to make sure morale remains high.
Next, we’ll cover the mistakes you should avoid when setting up your department.
As your team grows, well-defined processes are necessary to maintain order and efficiency.
But, processes can be too much of a good thing and slow your team down.
You need to regularly review your processes and ask:
Instead of enforcing strict rules across the board, allow for team-specific variations where appropriate.
Your goal should be to provide enough structure to maintain efficiency while leaving room for autonomy and adaptability.
In short, you need to balance structure with flexibility.
It’s the best way to ensure your entire department stays agile.
In large departments, career growth is too often overlooked. Especially if your focus is on hitting deadlines and growing the team.
But without clear career progression, mentorship, and learning opportunities, even your top engineers will disengage or leave to find better opportunities.
So, to avoid that, you need to invest in:
A strong career development framework won’t just help you retain talent – it will also ensure your team continuously grows in both technical and leadership capabilities.
And that’s key for long-term success.
Without consistent refactoring and maintenance, technical debt accumulates quickly.
This is especially true if maintenance takes a backseat to feature development.
Technical debt makes future development slower, riskier, and more expensive.
To keep it manageable, you should:
Unchecked technical debt will slow everybody down over time
And proactively managing it means you can scale effectively without being held back by past shortcuts.
It’s easy for your teams to accidentally work on the same problems, especially if their responsibilities aren’t clearly defined.
This leads to redundant work and wasted resources.
To avoid duplicated efforts derailing development, you need to:
The alignment meetings between team leads we mentioned earlier will help you keep everyone on the same page and avoid unnecessary overlaps.
And that’s key if you want to run your department efficiently.
Regular team lead syncs, cross-functional alignment meetings, and clearly defined OKRs will help you keep everyone moving in the same direction.
As your department grows, transparency and structured communication are more important than ever.
To prevent silos, you need to encourage regular knowledge sharing, host internal tech talks, and maintain a centralized documentation hub.
Information silos will slow down everyone’s progress, so make sure your teams have easy access to each other’s work, decisions, and best practices.
Build a dedicated recruitment pipeline, create a pool of technical interviewers, and standardize your hiring process.
It’s tempting to hire fast, but keeping quality high is crucial for long-term success.
Setting up a large engineering department the right way is key to scaling successfully.
As your team keeps growing, new challenges will emerge – ones we can’t cover because we aren’t there yet ourselves.
But, if you want to learn how to set up and scale your department from a small department to this stage, our full guide has everything you need.
You can find it at the link below – don’t miss out!
Marko started DECODE with co-founders Peter and Mario, and a decade later, leads the company as CEO. His role is now almost entirely centred around business strategy, though his extensive background in software engineering makes sure he sees the future of the company from every angle. A graduate of the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, he’s fascinated by the architecture of mobile apps and reactive programming, and a strong believer in life-long learning. Always ready for action. Or an impromptu skiing trip.
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