Scaling Engineering Teams to the Fast Growth Challenges: The 20/40/80/160 Team Milestones with Zendesk's Director of Engineering Pierre-Alain Bouchard, Director of Engineering & MD @ Zendesk

1. Pierre-Alain Bouchard
Engineering Director
Zendesk
@pabouchard
Scaling Engineering Teams to
the Fast Growth Challenges
The 20/40/80/160 challenges

2. 20
It is easy until you get there

3. - Conflicting priorities.
Harder to deliver on plans
- Product quality can be a
challenge
- Hiring senior talents is
hard
- (Too) Many shortcuts
taken while going fast
The first challenges

4. Focus on engineering management
- Structure teams around missions
- Complement your teams with experts
To hire seniors, make it personal!
- Establish a lightweight communication up and
down (company goals, teams contributions)
- Learn what is the right balance for your
business
- Blameless culture & Transparency

5. 40
Not really 2x20

6. - Teams are often failing to
deliver on committed dates.
- You have some key
contributors leaving
- Knowledge silos are
becoming an issue
- What is Engineering
doing?
When 40 feels slower than 20

7. The pitfall of the “The Spotify Model”

8. Focus on People Management and practices
- Fix the gaps in your people management
practices
- Focus on diversity (if you have not done it
before)
- Invest in projects that are providing productivity
gains and well-being
- Fight against inefficiency in your processes
- Reduce cross-teams dependencies when
possible

9. 80
Ready to take off?

10. - Planning product deliveries
is becoming complicated
- Maintaining your legacy
becomes a larger piece of
the daily work
- Your products may not feel
consistent anymore
Keeping everything together

11. Focus on Engineering directions
- Make sure you have the right engineering leadership in
place (Director/VP). Bring more seniority to your groups
- Obsess about strategic alignement, communication,
outcome & impact. OKRs can help if you are using them
right.
- Build accountable leadership groups. Give them the
directions and the metrics. Review regularly.
- Establish company wide tooling, framework and
process to improve the velocity and the consistency of
your teams

12. 160+
You are in some serious business!

13. - Engineering is serving multiple
businesses, internally and externally
- The operating complexity is
skyrocketing
- Improving velocity becomes even
harder
- Conflicting priorities are generating
escalations constantly
160 is a new league

14. Keep It Simple Stupid
- Your engineering culture may need to mature
- Provide common foundations across your
organisations, managed by experts
- Standardise and optimise for what is important to your
business
- Automate operations, status reports, data collection,
maintenance. Obsess about removing “waste”
- Give even more power to your leadership groups (inc.
finance)

15. Timing is everything!
1. You are going to be late but don’t try to optimise your organisation too early.
2. You have to tune the models for your scaling pace and your business
3. You engineering leadership need to be obsessive about improving efficiency and
consistency
My Top Takeaways

16. THANK YOU