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Discussion on: How do you preserve team cohesion as you scale?

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Ben Halpern

I'd say we're also "putting off some best practices", it's a tug-of-war between the right solution and the good enough solution. But planning for growth without slowing down the current process is the name of the game.

It helps when you have diversity of thought among leadership, but that they are willing to get along and hear each other out. Jess and I are constantly debating management practices. I'm usually on the "more freedom/more random creativity" and she's usually on the "more process" side of things, but we engage the debate and always keep an eye towards the future.

We also have a few abstract models we look up to. We love a lot of Stack Overflow's mantras and try to establish a healthy remote-first culture, even as our whole team is currently based in New York City. We also try to read a lot of the same books to get guidance. How Google Works gave us a lot of ideas that we think apply well now as well as in the future. It's important to also discuss the parts you don't agree with, because these books always have an element of narrative fallacy or hero-worship in them.

Conversations like this help too. I'm definitely going to check out Scaled Agile Framework.

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John Van Wagenen

Totally agree on selectively putting off some best practices. I think every company needs to do that no matter the size or market they're in. That's good to hear you have a good culture where things can be debated and challenged and that you're able to reach consensus. That's not always easy. Open cultures like that can be hard to find. And thanks for the book recommendation. I'll have to check that out.

Conversations like this definitely help. I also enjoy receiving the Software Lead Weekly newsletter and discussing it with my coworkers. There's been a lot of good stuff in there such as this one on communication at scale. A medium like dev.to is also a great place to hear from others in the industry and get a glimpse into other environments.