Cons of a fast-growing team

When I started back in July 2022 at Mercado Livre, I got assigned a team of 3 developers. Front and backend scope. Small group, easy to manage daily. Very good to start with given the new context I was in.

Turns out, there were plans to expand my team over the course of one quarter (roughly put). So I got heavily involved in the hiring process. Great feeling as I wrote before, you can do that while still learning the newly joined ecosystem and also actually deliver some results.

That went on well and I saw my team expand from 3 to 8 developers, gaining more capabilities with native ones being added over the "classic" front and backend. Nice. More people to look after and more possibilities.

Well, after a few months, I can say that it is not always a fun thing. Everything gets multiplied. Longer team rituals between planning, dailies, and retros. More people to actively look after between 1:1s, PDIs, performance reviews, etc. More personalities to understand and balance daily. More friction to manage and (yes, that's a lot of "more"), more tasks to be tackled at once.

Ok. Wait. Shouldn't this last point be great? Yes and no. And here comes the warning. Above all the mentioned points in the previous paragraph, you will have to handle more epics, projects, tasks, Jira, bugs, etc. This is something that can easily snowball and overwhelm a manager. Especially if your methodology is not well adapted to your environment, if you handle cross-team projects, or if your documentation is not ideal.

So my advice here would be to grow over time rather than "all at once" if possible. In my case, some specificities made this upgrade happen. Good thing is, I should not be concerned this year with extra team members. On the downside, it has been intense.