How to Build an Amazing Engineering Team for Any Company

Now more than ever, technical talent is in high demand because nearly every organization utilizes technology in some way to give their users a better experience. Companies need engineers to build these products and websites that make their businesses successful but hiring teams from scratch is not always easy. In this guide we will walk you through how to build a world-class engineering team for your growing organization.

1. Understand the Purpose of Your Engineering Team

The engineering team is there to design and create products. But wait, you say. Isn’t that the product department’s job?

While there’s plenty of overlap between engineering and product, and they often have to collaborate to develop a product, there are some key differences. The product department is generally in charge of the big-picture product strategy, while engineering designs and builds the product itself.

In short, product decides what needs to be done, and engineering makes it happen.

For some companies, these departments are combined. But because the priorities, processes, and metrics of each tend to clash with the other, it’s typically best to keep them separate, at least once the company has scaled beyond a certain point.

2. Know What Positions Your Engineering Team Will Need

The ideal size for your engineering team will change based on what stage of growth your company is in. For example, if you’re a Series A startup, your “engineering department” may consist of one person—possibly one of the founders. But as your company grows and approaches IPO, your engineering team will need to grow with it.

Eventually, you’ll need to add more titles to your engineering team, possibly including:

• Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
• VP of Engineering
• Director of Engineering
• Engineering Team Lead
• Software Developer
• Quality Assurance Engineer

Of course, the specific job titles used for each position will change from one company to the next. But regardless, the duties of the whole team will revolve around one thing: designing, developing, and optimizing the right products for your target market.

3. Decide Your Structure

As with organizational design in general, how you structure your engineering team makes all the difference. In fact, your team structure can be just as important as the employees you hire.

The right structure for your company will depend on your industry, goals, and unique needs. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, and each option comes with its own potential pros and cons. The three most common engineering department structures are:

Technology Teams

You can think of technology team structure as the horizontal approach. With this style, you’ll organize your teams around the layers in your tech stack. For example:

• Frontend
• Backend
• Database

The whole team is built around the product itself, and everyone reports to a single manager who specializes in that technology.

Product Teams

In contrast to technology teams, the product approach is more vertical. With this style, your teams are organized around business areas in your solution. For example, you might have a customer team and an order team. These teams will be more cross-functional, and each will need to incorporate the different skills required to deliver the product.

Read more: How to Build an Amazing Product Team for Any Company

Matrix Teams

Matrix team structure is designed to combine the best aspects of both technology and product teams. Under this system, developers report directly to a development manager, but are also “loaned” to cross-functional product or project teams where they perform their daily work.

Again, each of these three structures has its own benefits and drawbacks. It will be up to the leadership team to choose which works best for your company—or whether some other option may be better than all three.

Learn more: Google’s Matrix-Style Org Chart

4. Hire the Right People

No matter what structure you choose for your engineering teams, you shouldn’t expect them to be any stronger than the team members. That’s why it’s so important to make sure you hire top talent.

The best place to start is by advertising open positions on online job posting sites. For example, you might try:

• Indeed
• Monster
• AngelList
• ZipRecruiter

Any of these sites could be the perfect spot for you to find the bright, motivated employees your engineering department needs. There are also several sites designed to connect companies with remote workers in particular, such as:

• We Work Remotely
• Remote.com
• FlexJobs
• Dynamite Jobs
• Remotive

You can even find your ideal candidates by adding open positions to your public org chart right here on The Org. This will help you demonstrate your company’s strengths and show job seekers exactly how they’d fit into your organization.

5. Onboard New Hires

If you want to get the most out of your employees, the last thing you should do is leave their onboarding experience up to chance. Studies suggest that:

Most employees decide whether or not to stay with a company during their first six months Organizations with a strong onboarding process can boost new hire retention by as much as 82%

A major factor in that second statistic is almost certainly that employees who feel welcomed and well prepared in a new company and role are more likely to stick around. So right from the start, you’ll want to foster close relationships between colleagues and develop cooperative, tight-knit teams.

Read more: How Great Onboarding Improves Employee Retention

Plus, the more you streamline your onboarding phase, the faster you can ramp up new hires to maximum productivity.

6. Analyze and Optimize

In the world of engineering—as with nearly every other aspect of growing a company—there’s always room for improvement. Your CTO or VP of Engineering will need to continually optimize their strategies, adapt to changes in technology, and guide their department to greater heights.

But in order to really make your engineering team shine, you’ll need to create an environment of cross-departmental collaboration. Engineering and product in particular will need to work together, but for the best results, other department heads and C-level executives will need to cooperate too.

One of the best ways to facilitate that kind of culture is by creating an org chart for your company. By providing employees and managers with a visual directory of your company’s layout, you can make it easier for everyone to get along and get more done.

If you haven’t created an org chart for your company yet, just click below to get started today.