Personality Over Skillset: How Adam Wachtel Builds Engineering Teams

as organizations grow, teams have to evolve and grow and shift around.

And the re-teaming activity can be quite disruptive.

How do we do that well?

In my experience, again, I've been through a couple of acquisitions where you're working for a small company that gets acquired by a larger company, not necessarily large.

And in my case, started with a 30-person company that was acquired by a 200-person company.

We grew that to about 300.

Then we're acquired by a company with 10,000 people that was eventually publicly traded.

gigantic.

In my experience, kind of how we've attacked that is as we're exposed to new products and new areas of the business that have their own tech stack, their own technology that they're already working on, we try to get as much of the team cross-pollinated as possible.

So everybody gets to work on everything rather than a siloed approach where this team only works on this module or this area of the platform.

Everybody kind of works on everything.

People naturally hover to one area or another and they're kind of the specialists in that area like if we've got a high severity issue or something these are the folks you call but we try to get everybody exposure to all of the stack at least at a basic level so when they need to shift around or we have high priority over here we can move people there and it's not completely foreign to them

what's the culture that underlies all this

collaborative i'll say right we you know you got to have leadership you have to have centralized guidance of here's the company goals or goals from a product perspective kind of where the business is going but as far as the team culture goes collaborative right we're all professionals we're all here because we know what we're doing so collaborative where Everybody has an equal say.

Everybody is willing and able to speak up if they don't agree with the direction or they think we should do things differently.

What I tell everybody, especially when they join the company, is hang out for 30, 60 days, do things the way we think that you ought to do them.

But you come here with experience.

And if you think there is a different way to do things or a better way to do things, bring it up and we'll try it out.

That could be new technologies, the new frameworks, new processes, what have you.

Try to let the smart people be smart and everybody ends up benefiting as a whole.