Dear dev managers, how fast do your teams grow?

The growth of my team explained Posted by Lena Barinova on August 12, 2014 Know-how

Recently I’ve made some calculations to visualize the dynamics in my teams over the year.

Growth graph

I’ve been surprised: from 11 to 31 members, from 2 to 5 teams. My question is how fast can we grow in order to satisfy client’s hunger for features, but still keep the comfort for teams and do not increase technical debt of the product.

With every new member we slow down, as well as we increase communication channels. It usually lead us to different misunderstandings and other things such as: everyone having their own style, opinion, vision, speed, quality level, etc. And that’s the price you pay for growing. Some more technical of these differences we can easily unify by introducing coding standards, testing procedures, development processes. But what about soft ones? I have my way of introducing new members to my team, you can find it in this blog post.

What’s your speed of growing software development teams/departments?