fplive - scaling engineering: pre and post acquisition
TRANSCRIPT
Scaling Engineering:Pre and Post Acquisition
Building Shutl's engineering team and becoming an eBay company
@samsworldofno
This Guy
• Two history degrees, specialising in Victorian postmodernism, especially mental health and suicide
• Foucault!
• Victorians!
This (Startup) Guy• First startup was On The Beach Travel, started 2005
• Sold 2007 and 2013
• Joined Shutl in 2012
• Sold to eBay 2013
• I’d never worked at a big company before.
• Delivery that doesn’t suck
• Super quick and super convenient
• Aggregate local capacity into national
• … more to come
• One head of engineering
• One head of product
• One eng manager
• Two product managers
• One lead engineer
• Thirteen engineers
Product and Engineering
• Finding great people
• Getting things done
• Macro efficiency, micro inefficiency
• The Big Rewrite
Pre-Acquisition
Finding great people
Always be hiring
• Breadth of channels
• Take a long view
• You only get given what you give away
• Speaking is better than sponsoring
• Host community groups, give help
Pipeline
• Agree on a profile for what you’re looking for
• Us:
• Pride without ego
• Strong emotional intelligence and empathy
• Polyglot coding
• Perfect communication skills
Profile
• Phone Screen
• Face-to-face interview
• Product
• Engineering
• Pairing
• Presentation
Interviews
• Take-home technical test… what did you learn?
• Train your team on interviewing
• Give honest feedback
Respect candidates’ time
• Refine and iterate on your job spec
• Set pipeline targets
• Use your size
Tweak your process
• Good motivators:
• The mission
• Self-actualisation
• Teamwork and human interaction
• Bad motivators:
• Money
Keeping great people
• Constant feedback
• Regular 1:1s
• Goal setting and performance reviews
• Be in the detail without micromanaging
Engineering management
• The three stages of startup development, like an invasion
• Commandos
• Infantry
• Military Police
• Different people are suitable for different stages
The right people, at the right time
Getting things done
• Don’t sweat process
• Chaos is the enemy, flexibility is not
• Don’t covet tooling
• There are no agile prizes worth winning
Agile
• Define scope carefully and cut ruthlessly
• Do the smallest possible thing
• This brings learning and flexibility
• Go backwards
• This isn’t project management
Always be finished
• Pairing
• Heavy automation - “three times” rule
• TDD/BDD - judgement call
• Full stack everybody
Development Practices
Macro efficiency, micro inefficiency
• Emphasise business learning
• Don’t compromise on customer experience
• Half a product, not a half-assed product
Macro efficiency
• Flexibility is inefficient for developers but efficient for the business
• Agile is not about developer efficiency
• We chose lower risk over lower effort
• Premature optimisation is your enemy
• Any scale problems will be good problems
Micro inefficiency
The Big Rewrite
• Always leave code in a better place than you find it
• All repos should be clean
Hygiene and accessibility
• We replatformed to microservices in 2013
• Delivering business value at the same time
• Power V1 from V2, in phases
• Higher effort, lower risk
• No big bangs, no stress
• Engineering needs not blocking business requirements entirely
V2
• Consider:
• Code quality
• ability to onboard developers
• ability to iterate
• Maturity of business model
• Hiring challenges
When?
great job!
… and then you get bought.
You’re in the paper!
Title TextYou buy your dream piano!
Honeymoon in Barbados
You fly business class!
A crazy video conferencing system arrives at your office
You install this app
Problems you didn’t
have before
IT Time Travel
• Back to Outlook
• “Where are the servers”?
NASDAQ
• Getting used to the new world
• Growing the team
• Play well with others
• Keep selling yourself
Post-Acquisition
Getting used to the new world
• That corporate feeling
• Compliance training
• Big constraints on “staff functions” - HR, Finance
• Navigation difficulties
Worse
• Opportunities all around the company
• Training budget
• Growing the team
• International travel
• Can support good causes
• Benefits and job security
• Money
Better
• Focus on the opportunity
• Keep your independence
Finding the balance
• Big companies aren’t all the same
• How do you need to play
• Get on a plane
Understand the culture
Growing the team
• Hiring needs to remain your number #1 priority
This just got harder
• Compliance - implement, don’t clone
• Bring your strengths and experiences
Tweak your process
• Be honest with candidates
• Be honest with the team
• Keep the focus on the mission and how it’s going to succeed
The mission
• Working with people all over the world with different motivations is new
• Hire for it
• Mentor on it
Collaboration
Play well with others
• You will be frustrated
• Build relationships and compromise
• Don’t forget the human
Day-to-day
• Teams know they have problems that they don’t know how to solve
• Solve problems on a small scale, and shout about it
Let actions speak
Keep selling yourself
• Need to pitch everybody you meet, show why you’re relevant to them
• Need to get funding and support - budget, time, dependencies delivered
You’re still a startup
• We were concerned about a top-down plan being imposed on us
• Suggestions are just that - you are the experts, have confidence
• There is more flex than you think - the quicker you learn how to influence, the better time you’ll have
The plan
job done?
• An acquisition is not success in itself
• You still might fail
• You’re different to “core” teams
• You’re still a startup
Job not done
