How to Make a Great Team
Behnam Hatami Varzaneh
November 2025
Index
- Identify the roles you actually need
- Look for complementary skills
- Select people you can trust under pressure
- Validate fit before making it official
- Align on vision, values and commitment
- Decide Equity Fairly
MVP stage
Typical team size:
- 2–6 people
Engineering focus:
-
Ship fast, iterate fast
-
Use managed services & serverless/platforms
-
Prefer configuration over custom builds
-
Light QA, smoke tests, feature flags
Anti-patterns:
❌ Over-engineering microservices
❌ Writing complex CI/CD pipelines early
❌ Premature scalability decisions
mVP Stage Tech
Plus shared/central roles developing:
-
DevOps/Platform engineer
-
Data engineer/analytics
-
Security practices
Typical team size:
- 6–20 engineers total across 1–3 squads
Engineering focus:
-
Strong testing culture
-
Monitoring, alerts, incident response
-
Modularizing code into clean domains
-
Faster releases, trunk-based development
Good architecture posture:
-
Monolith with modular boundaries OR
-
Start extracting services only when necessary
Product-Market Fit Stage
Typical team size:
- 25–200+ engineers
Engineering focus:
-
Reliability, SLOs, cost optimization
-
Multi-region, caching/CDN, async architectures
-
Microservices when domain-boundaries are clear
-
Golden paths & paved road developer experience
Architecture posture:
-
Distributed systems, service ownership
-
Event-driven architecture, queues, CDC, streaming
-
Zero-trust security, compliance automation
Scale Stage
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Behnam Hatami Varzaneh
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By Behnam Hatami
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