The Team Scaling Checklist

What this checklist is for: deciding whether your engineering team is ready to grow, and what to fix first if it is not. Phase 1 gives you a readiness score. Phases 2 to 6 cover what to put in place before new people arrive and what to watch as headcount grows.

How to use it: check each statement below that is true for your team today. Be strict: if it is only partly true, leave it unchecked. Count the checks and compare your score with the table at the end of this phase.

Adding people to a broken system makes it break faster.

• New engineers can ship their first PR within 48 hours.
• Onboarding docs are written, current, and tested by the last person who joined.
• Code review turnaround is under 24 hours.
• CI/CD pipeline runs green on main every day.
• Architecture decisions are documented somewhere findable. ADRs, RFCs, a Notion page. The "why" exists outside people's heads.
• Team communication norms are explicit. Slack vs. async docs vs. meetings. New people cannot read the room on day one.
• You have a clear, written definition of "done" for features.
• Tech debt is tracked, not just complained about. A backlog, a debt budget, a quarterly cleanup sprint.
• At least one person besides the CTO can explain the full system architecture.
• Deployment does not require a specific person to be online.

Score	What it means	Next step
9-10	Ready to scale	Open roles and use Phases 2-6 to keep the foundation solid.
7-8	Ready, with gaps	Hire gradually and fix the unchecked items in parallel.
0-6	Not ready yet	Fix the foundation before opening new roles.

Your score: ___ / 10. Every unchecked box becomes a multiplied problem at 2x headcount.

Dev environment

• Local setup takes less than 2 hours. Measure it. Time the last new joiner.
• Setup is scripted or containerized. One command, not a 47-step guide.
• Seed data exists for local development.

Documentation

• README is accurate. Not aspirational. Tested last month.
• API docs exist and match the actual API.
• Runbooks exist for common incidents.

Testing and quality

• Test coverage baseline is defined and enforced in CI.
• Linting and formatting are automated.
• Integration tests cover critical paths. Signup, payment, core workflow.

Monitoring and security

• Error tracking is active and triaged weekly.
• Performance baselines exist. You know what "normal" looks like.
• On-call rotation is documented.
• Secrets management is centralized. Not .env files shared over Slack.
• Access controls use least-privilege.
• Dependency vulnerabilities are scanned automatically.