Scaling a Co-located Team

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  • noRGB

    Any advice or good articles to share for scaling co-located design teams? We're 7 strong right now, but about to ramp up and decentralize our team to work tightly with our dev centers outside of our Seattle HQ. This means hiring designers embedded with our Paris, Chicago and India teams, so time zones will be all over the place. We're running agile across the Tech org, but because design started out (2 years ago) as a centralized team, design has been managed more like Kanban, and I am responsible for solving this process gap.

    I appreciate any input.

  • monNom0

    That's sort of the magic bullet that everyone wants to figure out. Increasing size increases management complexity geometrically. Increasing distribution (ie: not in the same room -> worldwide) increases management complexity. So how do you scale a company without becoming top-heavy?

    I think you're best to make each team autonymous and just provide high-level from HQ.

    This is a good book that I think touches on that subject:
    www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Produc…...