What is an engineering team in software development? In short, it's a group of tech specialists (including developers, QAs, managers, etc) responsible for the building of the given service or product. These guys are the ones carrying out all sprints and working on features, updates, and bug fixes.

Tech companies have vastly different business needs and therefore vary engineering roles from one to the next. They support one another and collaborate closely throughout the production process.

So there is no canonical software engineering org structure. It can be various combinations of developers, software architects, managers, team leads, designers, and QA specialists.

Let's highlight key engineering roles and figure out why are they so important for your product development.

Software developer
Nowadays programmer is no longer the lone wolf. Today's tech culture tends to agile frameworks and close collaboration between developers. You can scale your engineering team with frontend, backend, or full-stack developers depending on your needs. Pay attention to the soft skills of your employees to be sure they can become a part of the team and maintain effective communication.

Tech Lead
Tech lead is the master of troubleshooting technical issues regarding software development, engineering, and product releases. Tech leads are experienced developers with management responsibilities. They should be skilled to effectively lead a team, consult and collaborate.

Types and levels of team lead roles vary from company to company as team structure is always unique to specific business needs and goals. A small startup doesn't require the same kinds of management roles as tech giants in Silicon Valley.

Quality Assurance Engineer
Quality Assurance specialists are responsible for testing the products and new updates. Every new feature must be properly reviewed and tested to ensure its quality.

QA engineers don't work on the initial build that is carried out by the developers, but often they need to write code for testing purposes. Also, they work with documentation to review and prepare requirements, specifications, test plans, test cases, reports, etc.

Project Manager
Project managers take care of the tech team management, keep an eye on deadlines, and сreate clear work plans and team schedules.

Talented and skilled PM can unblock tricky situations, eliminate bottlenecks and deal with any issues — such a hero of the day!

Without a PM, you have to keep all communication with a team and clients and expect surprising calls at any time of day or night. Experienced project manager on your engineering team board will take this burden from our shoulders.

Business Analyst
Deep validation of your ideas. Business niche analysis. Reducing risks. Project estimation. All these processes are made possible thanks to BA's efforts and talents.

Business analyst in your team is a key to:

• competitor analysis
• best technology stack, development methodology, and resources to your budget
• SRD development, including project risk assessment, cost estimation, feature list & mockups, etc.

"I'm not the smartest fellow in the world, but I can sure pick smart colleagues". A good team is a key to success. Mindset matters. Software engineering
culture matters. And putting together the right team is the real art of management.

Where to look for engineers to scale up? Let's highlight the 3 key approaches: dedicated team, internship, and freelancers.

No matter how smart and driven you are, your success depends on your ability to:

• create a team
• inspire a team
• work well together toward a common vision

For advice, we turned to Tim Howes, an American computer scientist, angel investor, and entrepreneur. This scaling guru pivot companies, onboard whole teams, help to expand them in the shortest possible time and does it masterfully.

In this section, we start considering five dimensions of scale by T. Howes — the five key points that engineering leaders need to know to scale like a boss.

The strength of the team is each individual member. So let's consider here some interesting team archetypes according to T. Howes:

The oracle VS the prophet
Almost every team has that character — bearded battle-tested engineer who has been there since the beginning. Such an oracle to whom people come for advice.

But not by bread beard alone: wise programming sensei is undoubtedly invaluable, but you also need people "who are more like a prophet", Mr. Howes says. Companies are interested in the evangelical style of someone who doesn't sit back and wait for people to come to them.

Moon-letters on Thrór's Map or the prophecy of Velva — talent to predict future trends and tendencies is a unique skill. Sharing new ideas with a team and building a development strategy are great benefits for a company. It helps to create an innovative, open-minded company culture and expand business horizons a lot.

The firefighter VS the fire marshal
Engineering teams are very good at putting out fires. And those merry men who respond best and keep a grip on themselves are rewarded for it.

But If you want to get out of such reactive mode and prevent issues and force majeure in the best possible way, you need to expand your fire brigade staff. "As an organization matures, you understand the need for a fire marshal".

As you scale your engineering team, find specialists who are eliminating the causes of fires, not just putting them out.

There is room in your company for different roles: multi-armed Shiva, inspirer and prophet, wise elder, and rebel. Don't be too conservative and be ready to reevaluate your business needs and adjust your organization's hierarchy.

The ability to focus on every stage of hiring, from searching to integration, will save your time and energy. However, not all companies give due consideration to it.

To quote Tom Howes, many businesses often put the hiring and onboarding on autopilot. Thus, the crucial processes that can't possibly go perfect become even more chaotic and ineffective.

Your key task is to structure these processes as perfectly as possible. Make it a talking point in meetings and demonstrate its value. You need to:

• Structure interview panels
• Analyze data from your hiring funnel
• Make integration thoughtful and keep an eye out for hiccups in your onboarding process to understand employee's dissatisfaction before it becomes critical

Here you can find Freshcode's eBook "Fast Track Developers Onboarding" and find some tips that can help you.

Vertical is not the only way to go. The horizontal organization can be effective in other situations. The crucial thing is to formalize the role of management and fill it thoughtfully. Equip every team to get a product off the ground, from engineering to QA to product management to marketing.

Communication is what makes teams strong. Communication is what builds trust. At the same time, maintaining effective communication is one of the most difficult tasks in the company.

The time will come when you'll reach a size where coworkers won't all know each other. In a team of 8-15 people, communication is interactive. You spend less time crafting your message because you deliver it in a dynamic way.

Scaling communication is not just about your morning dispatches to the team. As growth picks up speed, you need to foster regular interaction, including both formal and informal opportunities.

Vary internal formal communication with code reviews, architecture reviews, and demo days. It helps the company know how things ear going on.

What about informal events, they are no less important. "Once your organization passes a dozen, the whole team isn't having lunch together anymore". Brown bag sessions, beer bashes, theme parties, quizzes, and travel activities — just think outside the box for unusual ways to improve your team interaction.

Finally, the 5th dimension of scale, Her Majesty Quality. With scaling up, keeping a close eye on quality becomes exponentially more challenging.

Howes recommends the following rules to every engineering leader :

• Gather feedback about product/service quality via sending emails to all who had quality problems that day/week.
• Record details like crash rates
• Make a release checklist
• Codify an ever-increasing pool of knowledge into a checklist, a set of boxes each product team must check before any release
• Implement code reviews, functional tests, unit tests to structure the code well

Either your customer base is growing, or the stakeholders have new goals they want to implement as soon as possible — anyway, sooner or later, you will get to the point where you need to scale up.

To know how to build a team that fits your needs at scale, you should understand the as-is state of your business.

If you own an outsourcing company: The size of your team directly depends on the demand level. If you understand that there are more customers' orders than your existing team can address it's time to think about scaling and hiring tech specialists.

If you are a product company owner: Your team and its technical expertise determine the speed of product delivery and its unique value proposition.
Product companies might require scaling when more human resources are required to keep on track and don't miss timelines.

So put together your Fellowship of the Ring where every team member complements each other.