fplive - scaling engineering: pre and post acquisition

Scaling Engineering:Pre and Post Acquisition

Building Shutl's engineering team and becoming an eBay company

Sam Phillipssam@samsworldofno.com

@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

Thank you!Any questions?

Sam Phillipssam@samsworldofno.com

@samsworldofno