Sam Phillips from Shutl gave this talk on July 21st 2015 at FPlive, the startup community speaker event organised by Forward Partners. Sam talked about building Shutl's engineering team and becoming an eBay company.

1. Scaling Engineering:
Pre and Post Acquisition
Building Shutl's engineering team and becoming an eBay company
Sam Phillips
sam@samsworldofno.com
@samsworldofno

2. This Guy

3. • Two history degrees, specialising in Victorian
postmodernism, especially mental health and suicide

4. • Foucault!

5. • Victorians!

6. This (Startup) Guy
• First startup was On The Beach Travel, started 2005
• Sold 2007 and 2013
• Joined Shutl in 2012
• Sold to eBay 2013
• I’d never worked at a big company before.

7. • Delivery that doesn’t suck
• Super quick and super convenient
• Aggregate local capacity into national
• … more to come

8. • One head of engineering
• One head of product
• One eng manager
• Two product managers
• One lead engineer
• Thirteen engineers
Product and
Engineering

9. • Finding great people
• Getting things done
• Macro efficiency, micro
inefficiency
• The Big Rewrite
Pre-Acquisition

10. Finding great people

11. Always be hiring

12. • Breadth of channels
• Take a long view
• You only get given what you give away
• Speaking is better than sponsoring
• Host community groups, give help
Pipeline

13. • Agree on a profile for what you’re looking for
• Us:
• Pride without ego
• Strong emotional intelligence and empathy
• Polyglot coding
• Perfect communication skills
Profile

14. • Phone Screen
• Face-to-face interview
• Product
• Engineering
• Pairing
• Presentation
Interviews

15. • Take-home technical test… what did you learn?
• Train your team on interviewing
• Give honest feedback
Respect candidates’ time

16. • Refine and iterate on your job spec
• Set pipeline targets
• Use your size
Tweak your process

17. • Good motivators:
• The mission
• Self-actualisation
• Teamwork and human interaction
• Bad motivators:
• Money
Keeping great people

18. • Constant feedback
• Regular 1:1s
• Goal setting and performance reviews
• Be in the detail without micromanaging
Engineering management

19. • The three stages of startup development, like an
invasion
• Commandos
• Infantry
• Military Police
• Different people are suitable for different stages
The right people, at the right time

20. Getting things done

21. • Don’t sweat process
• Chaos is the enemy, flexibility is not
• Don’t covet tooling
• There are no agile prizes worth winning
Agile

22. • Define scope carefully and cut ruthlessly
• Do the smallest possible thing
• This brings learning and flexibility
• Go backwards
• This isn’t project management
Always be finished

23. • Pairing
• Heavy automation - “three times” rule
• TDD/BDD - judgement call
• Full stack everybody
Development Practices

24. Macro efficiency, micro inefficiency

25. • Emphasise business learning
• Don’t compromise on customer experience
• Half a product, not a half-assed product
Macro efficiency

26. • Flexibility is inefficient for developers but efficient
for the business
• Agile is not about developer efficiency
• We chose lower risk over lower effort
• Premature optimisation is your enemy
• Any scale problems will be good problems
Micro inefficiency

27. The Big Rewrite

28. • Always leave code in a better place than you find it
• All repos should be clean
Hygiene and accessibility

29. • We replatformed to microservices in 2013
• Delivering business value at the same time
• Power V1 from V2, in phases
• Higher effort, lower risk
• No big bangs, no stress
• Engineering needs not blocking business requirements
entirely
V2

30. • Consider:
• Code quality
• ability to onboard developers
• ability to iterate
• Maturity of business model
• Hiring challenges
When?

31. great job!

32. … and then you get bought.

34. You’re in the paper!

35. Title TextYou buy your dream piano!

36. Honeymoon in Barbados

37. You fly business class!

38. A crazy video conferencing system
arrives at your office

39. You install this app

40. Problems
you didn’t
have
before

41. IT Time Travel
• Back to Outlook
• “Where are the servers”?

42. NASDAQ

43. • Getting used to the
new world
• Growing the team
• Play well with
others
• Keep selling
yourself
Post-Acquisition

44. Getting used to the new world

45. • That corporate feeling
• Compliance training
• Big constraints on “staff functions” - HR, Finance
• Navigation difficulties
Worse

46. • Opportunities all around the
company
• Training budget
• Growing the team
• International travel
• Can support good causes
• Benefits and job security
• Money
Better

47. • Focus on the opportunity
• Keep your independence
Finding the balance

48. • Big companies aren’t all the same
• How do you need to play
• Get on a plane
Understand the culture

49. Growing the team

50. • Hiring needs to remain your number #1 priority
This just got harder

51. • Compliance - implement, don’t clone
• Bring your strengths and experiences
Tweak your process

52. • Be honest with candidates
• Be honest with the team
• Keep the focus on the mission and how it’s going to
succeed
The mission

53. • Working with people all over the world with different
motivations is new
• Hire for it
• Mentor on it
Collaboration

54. Play well with others

55. • You will be frustrated
• Build relationships and compromise
• Don’t forget the human
Day-to-day

56. • Teams know they have problems that they don’t know
how to solve
• Solve problems on a small scale, and shout about it
Let actions speak

57. Keep selling yourself

58. • Need to pitch everybody you meet, show why you’re
relevant to them
• Need to get funding and support - budget, time,
dependencies delivered
You’re still a startup

59. • We were concerned about a top-down plan being
imposed on us
• Suggestions are just that - you are the experts, have
confidence
• There is more flex than you think - the quicker you
learn how to influence, the better time you’ll have
The plan

60. job done?

61. • An acquisition is not success in itself
• You still might fail
• You’re different to “core” teams
• You’re still a startup
Job not done

62. Thank you!
Any questions?
Sam Phillips
sam@samsworldofno.com
@samsworldofno