What are some of the biggest challenges faced by engineering teams when startups begin to scale?

Kevin is the VP of Engineering at Abnormal Security, overseeing all aspects of growth and execution. In this class, Kevin describes the requirements for building a well-rounded and highly functional engineering team from both a technical and cultural perspective. Kevin spent time at eBay and Quantcast prior to becoming an early-stage engineer leader at TellApart, then a Director of Engineering at Twitter.

Kevin W: Yeah. There's a lot of problems that kind to face here. I think the underlying, problem that will be true across every single capacity is that one company starts scaling very quickly that company and the job is changing very quickly.

And it's, you have to be fully cognizant that how you did your job six months ago is probably just okay for you to keep doing it today and will patently be the wrong solution or the wrong process six months now in the future. Because again, how you operate as a team of three, people were very different than a team of 30 and a team of 300 and just identifying that's true across every.

Kevin W: And every way you do your job is very different. And I think really having that forward looking mindset to identify. [00:31:00] What company and what team are we going to look like 12 months from now? And then working very proactively towards solving those solutions to make sure you're keeping up with the pace of growth and scale is just super, super critical, right?

And that really comes from not only the technology you're building, but the processes you're using internally at the company to even the type of talent recruiting for the company, right? The types of people who want to be at a company, a 3:00 PM. Maybe very different than people want to be at a company of 30 or 300 as well.

So I think it's really needing to look forward to the future. Understanding what is the company quickly becoming and adapting, evolving as quickly as possible. All those different swim lanes from technology process, recruiting, everything that goes into it. And that's part of, I think the extreme challenge, but for me personally, just part of the fun of being at a startup, it's so dynamic and changing every day.

You'll never get bored because you know this job, even if you don't like it right now, it's going to change very quickly to the new one. and it's really staying on top of that and being very focused on the future and that kind of growth mindset that is very critical [00:32:00] that everyone in the team has to be, just employing.

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