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Team BuildingHiringLeadershipScalingMeta

Scaling the Team: From 15 to 50

Growing a team 3x in one year - hiring, onboarding, structure, and maintaining culture through rapid growth.

Evyatar Bluzer
3 min read

A year ago, VPS was 15 people. Today we're 50. Tripling a team while maintaining velocity is its own challenge.

Hiring at Scale

At 15 → 50, you need 35+ hires in a year:

  • That's nearly 3 hires per month
  • Assuming 10% offer acceptance, need 30+ offers per month
  • Assuming 10% interview-to-offer, need 300+ interviews per month
  • Assuming 10% screen-to-interview, need 3000+ candidate screens per month

This is a full-time job for multiple people.

Hiring Process Evolution

At 15: I personally interviewed every candidate

  • Deep assessment of each person
  • Slow, but maintained quality
  • Not scalable

At 50: Distributed hiring with calibrated interviewers

  • Trained interviewer pool (10+ calibrated interviewers)
  • Structured interview loops (consistency)
  • Hiring committee reviews (cross-check)
  • I meet finalists only (scale my time)

Quality maintained through process, not personal involvement.

Onboarding Investment

New hire effectiveness timeline:

  • Month 1: Learning, consuming
  • Month 3: Contributing at 50%
  • Month 6: Fully productive

With 3 hires/month, you always have a substantial new hire burden.

Investments:

  • Comprehensive documentation
  • Mentor/buddy assignments
  • Structured ramp-up projects
  • Regular check-ins

Onboarding is not a distraction from work - it IS work.

Organizational Structure

At 15: Flat structure, everyone reports to me At 50: Three-level hierarchy

Director (me)
├── Engineering Manager 1 (Localization)
│   ├── Tech Lead
│   └── 8 engineers
├── Engineering Manager 2 (Mapping)
│   ├── Tech Lead
│   └── 10 engineers
├── Engineering Manager 3 (Infrastructure)
│   └── 8 engineers
└── Staff engineers (3, cross-cutting)

Promoted from within where possible. External EM hires for growth.

Maintaining Culture

Culture dilutes with growth unless actively maintained:

Documentation of values: What we believe, written down

  • Bias for action
  • User focus
  • Quality and craft
  • Respectful debate

Rituals that reinforce:

  • Weekly demos (show working software)
  • Post-mortems (learn from failures)
  • Recognitions (celebrate what we value)

Leadership modeling: I must embody the culture I want.

Communication Overhead

Meetings scale with team size:

  • All-hands (weekly, 50 people)
  • EM syncs (twice weekly, 4 people)
  • Skip-levels (monthly, rotating)
  • 1:1s (weekly with directs, monthly with skips)

Managing meeting load while staying connected is constant work.

What I Learned

  1. Hire ahead of need: By the time you need someone, you're already behind.

  2. Invest in managers early: Good managers are multipliers.

  3. Process enables scale: What feels like bureaucracy at 15 is essential at 50.

  4. Culture is fragile: One bad hire can damage culture more than ten good hires can build it.

  5. Let go: I can't do everything anymore. Trusting others is mandatory.

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