Lean and Mean

The first time I saw the phrase “Lean and Mean” was back in the day, in the most peculiar place; a C pre-processing header in the Windows API (the actual name was WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN). If you #defined this in your program, it excluded some library headers from your program, resulting in a smaller executable (according to the documentation).

Disclaimer: The following article contains advice on how to organise and manage a tech organisation. Not many people agree with those practices, but if you follow them, they yield good results. One note though, they work better if you have a specific heavy tech-oriented management style.

So, now that we cleared the state of things, lets see a series of rules/advices that help you build a strong engineering team.

Scaling with tech, not *only* with people

You cannot scale your team only through hiring. You should focus on engineering excellence and on doing the hard thing in order to make the software work on its own, without human intervention.

If you hire more people to achieve scaling, you are creating the following anti-pattern; engineers tend to create more software by over-engineering. If you do not have concise scope for your teams, or you divide your product too much into small systems/micro-services, then you will end up in a very complex architecture that will require more human attention (from engineers) to keep in running.

Strong engineering culture (deep-tech mindset)

In short, your difficult tech problems should be always be addressed with innovative tech solutions. Usually, there is no off-the-shelf product that performs at the scale that you need it. When you are just a startup, you can pick several open-source solutions and work for you out-of-the-box. But when the game gets serious you need deep-tech mindset to survive.

In addition, if you are base your solution on open-source solution or services, you are always destined to be second at best. All the prime-time services, I am pretty sure they are not even public, but tailor-made software that are designed and optimised to solve a very specific problem.

So, from time to time, you will end up dealing with a problem that cannot be solved by…