Scaling the Big Health Engineering Team

Achievements  

• Built capacity to meet the business needs by scaling a fully remote team to 7 managers and 60+ engineers and off-shore contractors through a tight partnership with the people, product and finance teams.
• Designed cross functional teams to support efficient work on multiple workstreams in partnership with the Product function
• Maintained high engagement through empowerment, coaching, Hackathons, knowledge sharing and team events.

The Story  

Big Health’s mission is to help millions back to good mental health. They offer a suite of digital therapeutics products that are safe and effective non-drug alternatives for mental health.

The company was suffering from a scarcity mentality which was at odds with its product ambitions.

In the context of a multi-year replatforming project and supporting existing operations, this team of 12 engineers, their managers and a few QA contractors were making little visible progress in the eyes of management.

Making the work of the existing team visible was the first step to convince leadership to increase the budget and adjust compensation. This was followed by a tight collaboration with the people and operation teams to scaffold the recruiting and onboarding process, build the pipeline and overcome an unfavorable market at the time.

My team grew to 60 engineers and contractors, and 7 managers, with a spike of 20 hires over a period of 7 months with above market retention over 2 years. This new capacity allowed for sustained progress across all work initiatives.

It was very validating to see the throughput increase across all teams once we had crossed the required capacity threshold and had built some slack in the system.