Dive into the experience of a leader who built one of the largest SaaS engineering teams to understand what goes into building a product focused team, the ideal team structure at scale, hiring hacks for building your engineering leadership.

1. Let’s Go…
25th July, 2020
Building Winning Teams
STS Prasad, Freshworks
www.saasboomi.com/build

2. From $1-3M ARR
… to $10M over the next couple of years
… how do you grow your Engineering team?
You have proven product-market fit!
Your journey ahead

3. ● Being pulled in different directions by different customer segments
○ Breadth, depth and robustness needs of your product
● Increasing customer issues
○ Including availability and performance challenges
● Releases becoming less frequent and predictable
● Emerging hierarchy and functional silos
○ Front-end, Back-end, QA, DevOps
● Fragmented developer time
You want to move faster.
What are you facing today in Engineering?

4. ● Clarify and commit to your product and business strategy
○ Ensure that you are truly product-driven!
○ Focus on product depth.
○ Stay true to your multi-tenant SaaS model!
● Over-communicate
○ Ensure EVERYONE understands the big picture
○ … and is aware of your current challenges.
● Define your culture
○ What has brought you to where you are today?
○ What can your employees expect when they join you?
○ What are the guiding principles for decisions?
First look beyond Engineering ...

5. ● At $1M ARR, your entire product development team should be 15-
18 strong. Product development includes Product management,
UX design and Engineering.
● Aim for your product development team to be at ~80 at $10M
ARR.
● 1:1:6 across Product management:UX design:Engineering.
● 3:1 across Developers:QA
Watch out for over-specialization!
How big should you plan to be?

6. ● Avid learners: capable and eager to learn new technologies and
new engineering skills.
● Energetic: willing to go the extra mile all the time.
● Sensitive to customer pain: prepared to do whatever it takes to
resolve customer issues, any time of the day or night.
● A couple of experts in your technology stack, who can address
reliability, scalability and performance requirements - and provide
the leadership on non-functional requirements.
There must be something special about every one of your
engineers.
Which engineers should you hire?

7. ● Committed to your product and business strategy.
○ Support and complement your product managers.
● Hands-on: write code, write tests, lead by example, not just
managers.
● Take quick decisions and smart risks to get things done rapidly.
○ Aware of technical debt, and willing to let it build up in the rapid growth phase.
● Team players: focused on impact, not ‘territorial’.
● Attract and mentor the right talent.
● Ensure a sustainable architecture.
Your leaders must be players and coaches.
What about your Engineering leaders?

8. STS Prasad, Freshworks
sts.prasad@freshworks.com
Thanks!