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As tech-enabled organisations grow, engineering teams often double or triple in size within a short period, especially in product-led scale-ups and digital transformation programmes. Leaders face the dual challenge of maintaining engineering quality (high velocity, delivery standards and technical excellence) while also protecting the culture that makes the company attractive to engineers in the first place.
These themes were discussed by a group of engineering leaders in Leeds at a breakfast event held in November 2025, by Codurance, a global software modernisation consultancy trusted by enterprise technology leaders, and in partnership with Exalto Consulting. The discussion was hosted by Simon Shaw (Regional Director, UK North, Codurance) and James Milner (Managing Director at Exalto Consulting), and featured guest speaker, Josh Nesbitt (CTO at Genio).
The discussion explored practical strategies for scaling engineering teams without compromising technical excellence or team culture. The engineering leaders in attendance shared their own insights, and left with actionable approaches to manage growth, maintain high standards, and keep their engineering culture thriving.
Growth must be defined beyond just an increase in headcount. It could be driven by new products, entry into new markets or a shift in revenue goals from the C-Suite or investors. Leaders must prepare their team for growth by clearly explaining the why behind the growth, as existing teams may be significantly impacted through changes in their current processes.
Scaling can look very different in a startup or scaleup compared to in an enterprise organisation. The ideal time to scale is when a team is performing well at its current size and is ready for intentional growth. This transition requires significant change management which needs to be executed effectively for the size of the organisation.
The culture within an organisation should be clearly defined and consistently understood across all teams. A truly strong culture is visible at every level, ensuring that the experiences and perceptions of teams align with the vision set by leadership, a point Tracey Lawrence highlights in her featured Forbes leadership strategy article.
Fundamentally, the business will need to change its processes, focuses and sometimes ways of working to achieve its growth objectives, whilst maintaining its culture.
Codurance's Elite Performance ebook explores how teams can achieve speed and stability with CI/CD and DevSecOps. It's designed to help you transform your delivery process from a source of friction into a competitive advantage. Read the ebook at learn how to apply the practices that enable rapid delivery to create greater stability, resilience, and security.
Rapid growth requires a shift in how the engineering team, its code and team members’ roles are structured and defined.
The code base must be able to handle new contributors and new features as the organisation scales. Alongside this, the DevOps function must also be scaled proactively to support the growth.
As the team scales, roles must become better defined. Smaller teams thrive with generalists who tend to wear many hats. However, when these small teams begin to grow, there is a requirement for more specialists who can manage complexity and drive technical excellence in specific domains.
Spektrix, a leading technology provider for the global arts sector, partnered with Codurance to sustain its high-quality software engineering amidst its rapid growth. Read the case study here.
The role of a leader significantly changes with scale. It shifts from being more hands-on with the day-to-day tasks of the team to more of a leadership role that works to guide the team and manage stakeholders. The leader must emphasise collaboration, share knowledge with the team and identify any weaknesses or skills gaps that need to be addressed.
Leaders must be vigilant for signals that indicate a breaking point has been reached or is imminent. These signals can include:
Communication is key in every organisation, but it becomes even more important when a team scales. It can often be the first thing that breaks when scaling.
Communication needs to be strong within the team and different engineering teams need to be regularly talking to each other. Mechanisms need to be implemented to ensure that feedback from engineers flows upwards.
Scaling can often lead to the introduction of too many communication channels, resulting in information overload. There needs to be a homogenisation of comms, which means establishing clear rules and single sources of truth for different types of information.
Ultimately, leaders are responsible for communicating the core message down to the team and ensuring it's clear.
Culture can be a key factor in making a company attractive to potential employees. It must be proactively protected during growth and difficult times. As mentioned by Harvard, a poor workplace culture can also significantly impact the company’s bottom line, leading to low productivity and high turnover.
Leaders must foster a culture of psychological safety where it is safe to show failures and reward honesty. This creates a feedback culture geared towards continuous improvement.
Whilst sub-cultures may emerge in larger, geographically dispersed businesses the leadership's goal must be a clear, uniform culture from the top down. Behaviours need to come from the top and team members must trust the leadership team. Leaders must effectively communicate "the why" of the company's direction and delivery strategy, especially when welcoming new team members and embedding new partners, which is also echoed by McKinsey Digital Insights. Leaders must also establish ways for teams to challenge the level above and articulate the value of culture to the board or the C-Suite.
AI is impacting engineering teams in every organisation, whether that’s through the adoption of new tools and features or the concern of engineers being ‘replaced by AI’. Our Beyond the Hype ebook explores how engineering and technology leaders can strategically adopt AI. It discusses where AI can add value (and where it doesn't), the role of prompt engineering in quality output and how to use AI with purpose and discipline.
The primary goal of AI should be to augment and support the team’s outcomes, not to replace engineers. Companies need to figure out how to leverage AI to make teams leaner and more efficient.
AI-powered code generation puts more onus on Product Managers and engineering leaders, shifting the question from how to ship code to "what to ship" - i.e. defining the value of what the output is. In effect, AI has cheapened the production of code. Due to this, companies need to demonstrate how engineers are delivering value and measure for productivity in terms of delivering value, which is what executive teams care about.
Leaders must also consider where the next generation of experts and talent will come from, especially given economic pressures and the evolving required skill sets due to AI adoption.
As highlighted by Simon Shaw, James Milner, and Josh Nesbitt at the Leeds engineering leaders' breakfast event, scaling without breaking requires a deliberate strategy that manages two critical assets: technical excellence and team culture. Sustainable growth is achieved when the business proactively changes its processes and focuses on maintaining a thriving culture that is consistently defined from the top down.
Codurance is trusted by leading organisations to help implement the actionable strategies discussed in this article. Our services are explicitly designed to address the challenges of sustainable scale, as explored by the engineering leaders in attendance.
Our expertise across Software Modernisation, Cloud & Platform Engineering, and Engineering Enablement helps organisations scale their delivery capabilities with confidence. We remove bottlenecks, uplift engineering and delivery practices, and enable teams to shift toward measuring productivity through real value delivered; an essential evolution in an era of AI-augmented development.
Get in touch with us to speak to one of our specialists.
Simon Shaw is the Regional Director for UK North at Codurance. He helps organisation's accelerate modernisation, enhance delivery performance and build high-performing engineering cultures.
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