Past year
Standing up a new engineering team in a platform org
Engineering Manager
Scaled a green-field team from 3 to 14 engineers across geographies — set the technical bar, the culture norms, and the operating cadence from scratch.
- From 3 → 14 engineers in 9 months across two geographies
- Top-tier manager-effectiveness rating in the latest internal survey
- Zero attrition through the full ramp
What was on the table
A new platform-org charter, three engineers on day one, no shared rituals, and a backlog written in eight different voices. The job was not just to ship — it was to build the machine that would ship for years.
What I did
- Wrote the team charter on a single page; refused to ship before everyone could repeat it.
- Hired against a bar, not against a backlog. The first 5 hires set the cultural frequency for the next 9.
- Set up the operating cadence: weekly 1-on-1s, fortnightly demos, monthly retros, quarterly planning. Ritual, not bureaucracy.
- Pushed decisions to the smallest reasonable group. Most architectural calls happened in two-engineer chats, not in a 14-person meeting.
What it produced
A team that ships predictably, talks to each other when something breaks, and recruits its own next members without a manager in the loop. The kind of team that someone wants to join, not just one a manager wants to lead.
What I would do differently
I waited too long to formalise the on-call rotation. By the time we did, two engineers had absorbed disproportionate weekend pages. Lesson: on-call hygiene is a day-one problem, not a month-six problem.