Scaling Teams: Strategies for Building Successful Teams and Organizations

The book shares solid best practices on scaling organisations along several dimensions - hiring, people management, organisational design, culture and collaboration/communication. The advice is very practical and well aligned with the successful practices I've observed at multiple hypergrowth companies

This book has been valuable to me as an engineering VP to think about how to build an org at scale - beyond the team composition and change type topics I write about in Dynamic Reteaming. This book is written from the perspectives of engineering leadership and has helped me get my head around the VP role. Specific things that helped me from this book included the sections on how to evaluate your hiring process, communication design and how to write a scaling plan. The scaling essentials section at the end of the book can be used as a needs analysis for how to scale your org.  It’s gold.

Scaling Teams has many practical examples and real-life case studies to give you needed inspiration when scaling your own product teams.

Growing a startup past its initial team is one of the most vexing challenges that a founder or early employee will face. As teams grow, problems begin to arise. Communication becomes harder, and progress slows to a crawl just as the challenges faced by the company begin to mount. Without careful planning, the company and team are bound to fail in this crucial time.Packed with practical, battle-tested advice, Scaling Teams is an essential read for managers and founders seeking to grow their teams. Rather than present broad philosophical approaches to management, the book focuses on the practical: developing a scaling plan, the merits of various models of team organization, even how to organize your inbox and communication channels for maximal communication. Moreover, the book contains pointers to external blog posts that provide a wealth of real world stories and experiences that supplement the text. When scaling a team, plan beats no plan, and Scaling Teams is essential reading for those planning on growing their teams and companies.The book has a few drawbacks. It is clearly aimed at managers and offers less practical advice for the line engineers in a rapidly growing company. The work of scaling a team is indeed a team effort, and I would have liked to see more emphasis on advice to non-managers.

Good content that is not repetitive like so many books of this nature. Its not the most lively writing style ever so it is dry at times. I bought the physical book from Amazon and it appears that I either got a counterfeit copy or O'Reilly/Amazon are selling print-on-demand copies that are B&W. There are references in the text to color diagrams (e.g. p 109 figure 5-1) but the diagrams are all B&W. The printing quality and binding are also quite mediocre. The book will not lay flat and I imagine that any effort to make it do so will break the glue in the perfect binding. In summary, the content is good but you may want to consider either not getting the physical version or going to a brick and mortar store to look for a higher quality copy then you get here on Amazon.

I worked with David at Amazon.com years ago and always found him to posses a rare combination of deep technical expertise and profound sensitivity to how people feel about the work they are doing. He's played key roles in scaling both Amazon and Twitter and this book offers great insights into how any team that's growing can continue to execute. The anecdotes from both authors make the concepts very real and easy to relate to. Highly recommended!

This book is a great, concise representation of the challenges one faces when scaling teams. If you can get your hands on it before you have to scale a team, that'd be best :)

I'd name it as executive summary for building healthy development teams.I'd recommend to read something about establishment of dev process first/

Aimed mostly at hyper growth companies growing at insane rates, so not as directly applicable to growth in more modest UK companies!Some good lessons to be learnt though!

Habe mir das Buch aus aktuellem Anlass zugelegt. Bin begeistert. Kein Wort zu viel, dafür alles was man braucht, auf den Punkt gebracht. Entgegen dem Claim auch für Teams, die keine Start Ups sind, anwendbar. Großes Plus: mit zahlreichen Verweisen auf zusätzliche Literatur/ Artikel, sowie Erfahrungsberichten aus Start Ups bzw. Unternehmen, in denen die Autoren tätig waren.Das Buch deckt alle Bereiche von der Rekrutierung über Einführung neuer Mitarbeiter, Organisationsstruktur, -kultur sowie Vorteile und Nachteile unterschiedlicher Team Formen ab. Es ist ein Buch für Praktiker, entsprechend fehlt der theoretische Überbau, wie bereits erwähnt, findet man jedoch zahlreiche Hinweise auf weiterführende Literatur, wenn man ein Thema vertiefen möchte. Die Kapitel funktionieren auch in sich geschlossen, so dass man bei bestimmten Interesse, einfach gezielt das jeweilige Kapitel lesen kann. Eine weitere Stärke sind die vielen Beispiele, die helfen, sich eigene Gedanken darüber zu machen, wie man sein eigenes Team am besten aufziehen möchte. Statt einem platten "Google macht es so, also ist das richtig" werden weitere Beispiele gegeben und Vor- und Nachteile erläutert. Ich bin schon über 10 Jahre im Software Geschäft und kann das meiste was in diesem Buch steht, aus eigener Erfahrung direkt unterschreiben. Klare Kaufempfehlung!

Great advice and experience from authors. Lots of examples from companies and case studies from culture and people management issues.

Lo compré pensando que sería interesante para cualquier tipo de empresa pero se centra estrictamente en startups tecnológicas con gran potencial de crecimiento. No me sirve pues no es el tipo de empresa que me interesa.