Scaling While Maintaining Quality and Culture

The Question

Walk me through the most challenging team scaling experience you've had. How did you maintain quality and culture while growing the team?

The Challenge

The team consolidation was also my hardest scaling experience. In April 2022 my team tripled—from about 4 people to 12 across three technical domains. DevOps was a fairly new team focused on cloud. SysOps was an older team focused on datacenter work. Neither was my core expertise.

The headcount wasn't the hard part. The complexity was: integrating different cultures, processes, and technical domains while improving quality, not just preserving it. I'd seen team merges settle at the lowest common denominator before, and I was determined to avoid that.

Sequencing Mattered Most

I covered the consolidation mechanics in the previous post—the months of listening, the single Kanban board, removing process walls. What I want to emphasize here is the pacing.

I waited nine months before proposing structural changes. Then another year and a half before raising standards. Each phase built the trust needed for the next one. If I'd pushed higher standards on day one, before people trusted me or each other, it would have backfired. They needed to see that I was there to help them, not judge them, before they'd accept harder expectations.

Closing the Expertise Gap

I was honest about my limitations. I couldn't deeply review Terraform or infrastructure code, so I leaned on the senior engineers already on the DevOps and SysOps teams. I gave them decision-making authority in their domains and asked them to teach me what I needed to understand.

I focused on what I could provide: clear priorities, protection from organizational noise, unified processes, and system-level architectural thinking. This worked because people felt their expertise was valued. I wasn't pretending to know everything—I was creating space for them to lead.

As we grew, I filled gaps intentionally. I hired an entry-level systems administrator for routine operational work—certificate management, user onboarding, environment administration—which freed senior engineers for automation and infrastructure projects.

Hiring to Sustain Culture

My hiring approach mattered during scaling. Team-driven decisions with unanimous buy-in meant new hires had advocates from day one. Hiring for problem-solving over specific technology expertise meant we brought in people who strengthened the culture rather than diluted it.

Results

The outcomes from the consolidation tell the quantitative story: MIDS uptime improved, we eliminated planned downtime, migrated 2,000+ sites to Azure, and cut after-hours incidents. But the stronger signal was cultural—nine of twelve people thrived under higher standards. They said the standards made collaboration easier and built confidence.

The lesson: patience. Listening, unifying, raising standards, growing—each phase required trust from the previous one. That deliberate pacing is what made scaling work without sacrificing quality or losing people.