Lessons from Q3: Shipping Faster with a Bigger Team

Q3 is wrapping up and it's time for an honest look at the quarter. We scaled from 14 to 22 engineers, shipped two major integrations, and introduced chaos engineering practices. Not everything went smoothly.

What worked

The adapter pattern for payments. We switched payment gateways mid-quarter. Because we'd built the abstraction layer I wrote about earlier, the migration took two weeks instead of the two months it would have taken with tight coupling. Architecture decisions made under no pressure paid off under extreme pressure.

Kanban for the ops team. Moving our platform team off Scrum eliminated sprint planning frustration and gave us real visibility into their throughput. Lead time dropped 35% because WIP limits forced focus.

Game days. Our first chaos engineering experiment exposed three resilience gaps that testing never caught. The investment in my Gremlin certification translated directly into team capability.

What didn't work

Onboarding speed. We added 8 engineers in 12 weeks. Our onboarding process wasn't built for that pace. New engineers took 4-6 weeks to become productive. That's too long. I need better onboarding documentation and a structured buddy system for Q4.

Cross-team communication at scale. The communication patterns that worked at 14 people broke at 22. Information started siloing between teams. I caught decisions being made without cross-team input too often.

My own time management. Three accounts, a growing team, and a certification — something had to give, and it was deep focus time. I spent too many days in back-to-back meetings with no time to think strategically.

What I'm carrying into Q4

Invest in onboarding before the next hiring push. Implement cross-team architecture review sessions. Block two mornings per week for strategic thinking with no meetings.

Quarterly reflections are only valuable if they produce changes. These three changes are my commitment for Q4.