How to Make a Great Team

Behnam Hatami Varzaneh
November 2025

Index

MVP Stage (0 → MVP → First Users)

PMF Stage (Growing Users, Real Revenue)

Scale Stage (Millions of users, multiple product lines)

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

  • 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

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

Too Top-Down → Bureaucracy

  • Slow decisions

  • Low innovation

  • Senior engineers leave

Too Bottom-Up → Chaos

  • Competing architectures

  • Tech sprawl

  • Misaligned product direction

bottom-up and top-down decision-making

Criteria Example
High impact / irreversible Company pivot, security compliance, architecture direction for years
Cross-team alignment required Shared platforms, product portfolio planning
Time-critical / emergency Production outage, legal risks, data breach
Vision, strategy, funding, priorities Annual OKRs, budget allocation

top-down decision-making

Criteria Example
Technical and domain-specific API design, database schema, refactor plans
Reversible decisions UI/UX experiments, service configuration
Close to customer problem Feature improvements, internal tooling pain points
Innovation and iteration Hackdays, prototypes, experimentation culture

bottom-up decision-making

  • Financial Incentives
  • Recognition & Appreciation

  • Career Growth & Learning

  • Autonomy & Ownership

  • Purpose & Alignment

  • Team Culture & Fun

  • Transparent Feedback & Recognition Systems

  • Align Incentives with Desired Behavior

incentives

Engineering Career Ladder

Category Example
Technical Excellence System design, coding, debugging, testing
Execution & Ownership Delivering features, reliability, prioritization
Collaboration Communication, teamwork, cross-functional work
Leadership & Influence Mentoring, architecture direction, decision-making
Product & Business Impact Understanding user needs, cost/benefit thinking

GET IN TOUCH

behnamhatami@gmail.com

+98 913-412-4420

Behnam Hatami Varzaneh

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