The 10 Most Innovative CDN Disruptors to Watch in 2022 May2022

contractor retrofitting and scaling CI/CD pipelines and
training engineers how to write better tests.
The challenge is right-sizing this all along the way, and the
trigger points on when to change may not be obvious. I say
this because we grew headcount by 22 engineers from Oct
2017 to Feb 2018, and in the process we did not modify our
simplified Kanban approach to a prescribed Scrum process
quickly enough. Growing pains emerged, to say the least.
Now we’re in a spot where we can withstand a magnitude
scale of growth with roughly the same squad and tribe-level
process.
Management
Riffing off rapid growth of Brains in engineering, we didn’t
scale management fast enough. Almost all startup
engineering orgs start very flat, with all ICs and no
management. You have “tech leads” who may split their
time doing light managerial functions, but they all write
code and dive into the operations.
The biggest fail here in scaling the ICs was not scaling the
org and management structure to follow. At ~44 engineers
and data scientists, we have a duty to deliver on our mission
to provide an environment where they have the opportunity
to do the best work of their lives and be worth more in the
marketplace.
Without this vital management structure, there is a vacuum.
Do not bolt this on later, build it as you go. We took
inspiration from Spotify’s model of engineering
organizational scaling.
Growth & Career Pathing
We’ve talked about all of these fails, how about something
that has worked well for us?
When doing initial contact with a candidate, I often ask
“why are you in market?” I have seen countless folks who
are looking because their current management does not
have their growth and career pathing in mind. In extreme
cases, they can do a day’s work in four hours, feel like they
are under-challenged, and have not learned anything in
years. They work in an environment like the movie Office
Space.
Taking an opposite approach is to engage in the growth and
pathing of every individual. We do this by:
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Aligning the growth of the individual with the
company’s growth.
Having management check in frequently on the success
of this, and
Setting up formal quarterly check-ins on measuring
these goals. Google adopted this early on from John
Doerr in the form of OKRs, and there are great
platforms out there which can formally measure and
track these objectives.
Career pathing is a longer-term concern. I ask candidates
from the start “so what’s the next job after VideoAmp?”
This often catches them off guard, then after careful thought
most reply with a role 1-2 levels beyond where they’re at
now. It’s our goal to help steer them in whatever path they
currently see.
Many earlier-career engineers think management is their
ultimate path, but I have found that many will stay on a
tract of engineering excellence. Whether it’s a Principal
Engineer or a VP of Engineering, the goal is to orient the
new challenges in a manner which grows them in that
direction, even if we can’t fully realize their ultimate
pathing goal while at the company.
By paying careful attention to these details, we have found
our annual retention rate in the high 90%.