Managing scale at a fast-growing startup is challenging enough, but managing the inevitable toil that arises as you scale adds to that challenge.
Toil is the operational burden of engineering. It’s the work that needs to get done to keep things running, but doesn’t make any new impact. As companies scale, toil can creep up not only in infrastructure and architecture, but also in processes. And as new pressure points are discovered, things can begin to break down.
Over the last few years working at Upside, I’ve had a front-row seat to how our company and our individual teams have scaled.