Scaling Up Octopus

YOW! September 2021 Recap

Mike Noonan

Noonan opened up by giving away the takeaways from his talk right at the start;

“Choose your culture. Explain and demonstrate what good looks like. Start, learn, and iterate.”

He then dove in to explaining exactly why these statements were so important. Octopus Deploy had a tremendous opportunity to grow as a business and Engineering organisation; but the team wanted to be very deliberate about doing it. They asked themselves, “Should we scale?” and used the following criteria to help inform that decision;

In the end, Octopus’ leadership decided they were in a good place to scale; but they knew they would have some challenges at hand to turn productive teams into a productive, scaled organisation. So the key in Mike’s mind at least was to focus on what you could control. The foundations of this growth would be built upon good culture, and guided by great leadership. So Octopus took the decision to choose their own culture, and write it down - spawning the Octopus Handbook. This would be supported by an active decision by management to build and retain experienced leaders. In Noonan’s own words,

“This is your ability to hold onto the tiger you’re going to be riding as you scale”

So onto scaling itself, and Noonan chose to challenge a few myths;

1. You can’t increase diversity when scaling up. Rubbish, says Noonan. This is instead the best time to do this.
2. You need to lower the bar to scale up. Again, this is busted. If you’re an attractive place to work - and people buy in to the handbook Octopus advertise - then you don’t have to worry about lowering the bar.
3. You can’t scale up without hierarchy. This was a difficult one; you inevitably need to add hops in your organisation as you scale, but you can still promote autonomy within your teams and people. Nobody wants a bottleneck.
4. You can’t maintain or improve your culture when scaling up. Again, this is busted. If people are joining you because they want to be part of your culture in the first place, you’re not going to have problems keeping it.

Not everything was smooth, though. Despite having a good culture and breaking down a few myths along the way, there was still a lot for Noonan and team to learn when scaling Octopus. Namely;

• Even though culture was important, they underestimated the amount of effort they’d need to put into building and reinforcing it over time. People and culture programs needed much greater investment than they had before.
• Solid Process Engineering skills are invaluable. To scale well, you need to nail your processes - hiring, interviewing, onboarding, etc. If things aren’t working, you need to detect that and change.
• In the past, we’d avoided specialisation, particularly around people management skills. Reading Pat Kua’s Engineering Manager Archetypes helped us realise the kinds of leaders we needed to design in.
• Making higher quality decisions at speed feels slower than what we were used to; but we learned that this was okay.
• “Lightbulb moments” came when we drew maps of team ownership and then gave teams empowerment to achieve their work with autonomy within those boundaries.

Building on the lightbulb moment, Mike finished up by talking about the things they did that really helped the scaling process;

• Adopting RACI terms to help guide decision making and clear up responsibilities
• Clarifying ownership at a team level
• Building owners of ‘career tracks’ that helped people grow their career in a certain direction
• Forming technical leadership groups to act as bar raisers and standard setters for the rest of the organisation
• Making the planning and allocation process as transparent as possible, so people understand the ‘why’ behind decisions
• Choosing a cadence for organisational communication and change; this means change becomes much more normal, predictable, and manageable.

Noonan wrapped with some books that he recommended to his own leaders throughout the scale-up process; Radical Candour, which speaks to creating workplaces with open, honest and direct communication - but no assholes; High Output Management, which shares lessons on managing and developing people from real-world experience at Intel; and Shape Up, which details Basecamp’s “shaping” strategy to product development and infroms a lot of Octopus’ own approaches to delivering work.

Having been through a ‘scale up’ myself, this was a great retrospective on some of the things that we did right - and a better understanding of some of the things that perhaps didn’t quite go to plan. It’s a highly recommended talk if you have a chance to catch it.