Scaling the scaleup, or my journey of feeling stressed, overwhelmed and continuously failing started in January 2023 when I joined my current company. I stepped into the tech leadership role after the previous CTO left.
Before we dive into all the nitty-gritty details, a quick intro. I’ve been a software developer for almost two decades. Starting with web development, and slowly growing into a full-stack developer. After hundreds of different projects, quite a variety of clients, and a bunch of companies on my resume I decided to tackle a bigger challenge rather than a technical implementation. It took me two years of applying for different positions in management, starting my own SaaS company and failing miserably there to finally get the opportunity and pursue my new career path.
I stepped into the world of heads, becoming a head of technology in a non-tech company that had a small team of five developers. They should have just called me a tech manager or a team lead, considering the scale of things back then.
But I quickly picked up the pace. Being very passionate about operational excellence and willing to make an impact I pushed and pushed. I spent hundreds of hours following online trainings in product ownership, SCRUM, KANBAN, team management, people leadership, and the list goes on. I tried everything I learned. And after three years I was running a team of twenty developers, working on several brand-new products. Another two years and we doubled in engineering headcount and had a very solid framework in place with set of reusable libraries, processes and procedures in place that let us spin up a new MVP in matter of six or eight weeks.
Then things became stale for me. I knew everything was working well. I had a strong team of directors leading their units. Our products looked great and were getting more and more traction on the market. I could afford to take it easy and enjoy my personal life. And I did. But at a certain point, it became boring. I wanted to feel the drive again, to make an impact, and be part of the change.
So I started looking for a new challenge and after a few interviews, I joined a scale-up company. A company that just went over a hundred people in headcount with about 40% in the engineering team. The team I took over. A new tech stack, a new cloud (AWS), and a new domain, geographically spread across two countries.
And here I am, writing my first post in my brand-new blog just to lay out all my thoughts, and share my pain, hoping it’ll help me to keep my emotions contained and maybe it would be handy for somebody out there to avoid my mistakes and learn a thing or two.