Team Complexity Post-MVP
By 20 engineers, most data teams have one person every change waits on. The backlog put them there.
Post-MVP, the platform outgrows the founding engineer’s head. The knowledge doesn’t spread with it. You get an Alex: the review queue forms behind one name, “ask Alex” replaces the docs, and Alex’s vacation becomes a deployment freeze.
The backlog kept routing urgent work to whoever was fastest. Fastest meant Alex. Every ticket made the gap wider.
When I led a 6-engineer platform team, the structure that worked was boring:
- Every critical pipeline gets a primary and a secondary owner. Named, written down.
- Reviews and on-call rotate, including the founding engineer.
- Decisions get a one-page record, so the next person reads the why.
Cost: some short-term speed. The secondary owner is slower at first, by design.
Do it before 20 engineers. After that, the gap is political, and Alex is usually burned out.
Who’s the Alex on your team right now?
Fractional Data Architect helping startups and scaleups build data platforms that scale.
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