Scaling engineering teams: Insights from Amplitude's EVP of Engineering

In an environment where your company will win or lose based on product quality, empowering your development teams with a strong ownership mentality is critical.

This week, we’re joined by Shadi Rostami, the Senior and Executive Vice President of Engineering at Amplitude.

We explore how Amplitude has built a strong engineering culture by empowering their development teams to own the product process from end-to-end. This ownership culture is boosted by strong customer empathy fueled by internal dogfooding, strong goals focused on improving engineering performance by streamlining the developer experience and a focus on enabling both technical and non-technical teams. 

Join as we discuss: 

• How Amplitude creates a culture of strong ownership in their engineering teams 
• How to resolve the tension between the product and engineering teams
• How to improve developer experiences as product grows in scale. 

If you like what you hear, you can watch every episode of Level Up on our YouTube page! 

How Amplitude creates a culture of strong ownership in their engineering teams 

Amplitude’s culture and Rostami’s values overlap when it comes to the concept of ownership. There are several significant ways in which the team fosters ownership:

• Nobody works in a silo
• Decisions are data-informed
• Leaders make their presence felt

Say ‘no’ to the silo

There’s no isolated QA team that sits, waiting for a separate DevOps to complete a ticket so that further testing can be scheduled.

Engineers own the entire process, building the product, testing it and pushing it into production. If there’s an issue along the way, the highly responsive team deals with it immediately.

When engineers are client–facing and hearing first-hand the excitement, passion and frustration along the journey, it further motivates the team to find the fitting solutions. Having this happen on rotation at least once monthly evenly spreads the responsibility without overwhelming anyone either.

Human connection is the foundation of a team that operates with a strong sense of ownership.

It’s all about the data

Rostami says, “Alongside qualitative data and meeting with customers, it's also important that we have quantitative data.”

Her team is constantly seeking value within data, such as specific interactions and conversions but also drop-offs (those people who don’t convert at every stage of the journey).

Leaders set the tone

This occurs by setting the priorities, firstly, and then by living those out on a daily basis.

Simple, yet powerful, rituals like recognizing milestones and effort from team members encourages stronger relationships between people and the work that they each do.

“Leaders are not just people managers,” Rostami says. “We have a lot of technical leaders in the company.”

When you have highly competent people that lead by example and “show the way” rather than just talking about it or pointing it out to others, the working atmosphere becomes a trust-first one.

Resolving the tension between the product and engineering teams

The tension we’re referring to in this episode is the friction that can sometimes occur between product and engineering teams when it comes to being on call to patch certain issues.

Some patches require that people be on call for immediate fixes and others require a state of flux on daily tasks, pushing back certain items that may create pressure elsewhere, such as launching new features on time.

Understand the requirements

This is usually where Rostami starts resolving (and, ultimately, preventing) the tension.

“There are functional and non-functional requirements, but these are all product requirements,” she says.

For example, a button is a simple component — and we know that it can be clicked and something will happen after that if we program such a function — but the user experience (the button being easy to find or read) also matters. So, product and engineering teams have to think with both in mind to build something that really works for customers in the end.

Plan, reflect and invest

In quarterly planning sessions, Rostami gives her team members the opportunity to reflect on what portion of their work days are spent on certain things like housekeeping and documentation.

Based on the data, decisions are made to either intervene or not intervene until the next quarter. What data might that be? 

Well, an example could be: how many products and product types you’re working with, and where you are with each of those in terms of their respective roadmaps.

Improving developer experience while scaling

“If the scale of your product increases by an order of magnitude, you probably need to re-architect your product,” says Rostami. “And if the team size doubles, you have to re-architect your team.”

As human beings, we have the tendency to not pay attention to something until it’s urgent. In the case of your developers — especially when required to be on call — you’ll know your team needs to be restructured once many people are being woken up by emergency support request calls in the middle of the night.

It’s important to remember that your company is a group of people and that people are complex and constantly changing, too.

Key takeaway from this episode: Developing a sense of ownership requires discipline and consistency with the smaller rituals and habits, just as much as it requires formalization and assignment of championship titles.

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