When I need to grow my engineering organization, I often prefer growing and splitting teams over bootstrapping completely new teams. Even though growing teams is slower than just bootstrapping on the green field, I still go for it as you can spread and transfer the most domain and tribal knowledge into both new teams, and keep your existing culture largely constant. During the hypergrowth of Personio, I was fortunate enough to participate in multiple teamsplit events, and I collected my learnings and what went well in this article.

We are right in the middle of a pretty serious economic downturn: We see big layoffs at major tech companies, the stock market is on fire and all companies are switching gears. I collected some thoughts on how Engineering Managers can best navigate this downturn and adapt what we’ve been doing during the boom years. Let’s explore good ways on how to do more with less, how to support our teams during this cycle and how we could adapt our hiring for the time to come.

This is one of my larger learnings of the last year(s) as an Engineering Manager and as a Manager of other Engineering Managers. It’s also something I had to learn the hard-ish way as I did it wrong in my first leadership role, and watched peers struggle hard in my current role. My default brain setting is “anarchism” and I have a hard time following the rules, whatever they may be, so this one is a particularly hard challenge for me.