Scaling your startup's agility: The power of atomic teams

We all know the strengths of a startup—the electric buzz of a small, tight-knit team working together seamlessly, testing ideas rapidly, and everyone feels a real sense of ownership. That’s the magic I believe every growing company should strive to keep. But how do you scale without losing that vital agility? In my experience, the answer lies in scaling through the principles of atomic teams.

An atomic team is a small, powerful engine. It's ideally up to 8-9 people, a self-sufficient unit with members from product, design, and development. They are autonomous, making their own decisions within their domain. They are laser-focused, with clear, measurable goals. They iterate quickly, getting feedback and making changes rapidly. Each team member feels a strong sense of ownership, and they’re encouraged to come up with new ideas. Each team acts as an independent entity with the ability to experiment and pivot quickly.

But here's the thing: as companies grow, they often lose this spark. Merging teams creates communication headaches as information can get stuck in silos. Bureaucracy slows down decisions, and people feel less responsible due to feeling smaller and smaller in the growing machine. I've seen these issues hinder innovation and make it hard to adapt to change.

I believe we need to think differently about scaling. Instead of merging teams, we should create new, independent atomic teams. Large projects should be broken down into smaller, manageable pieces, and each team should take ownership of a piece. We need to set clear boundaries and communication flows between teams. For example, I'd suggest that instead of combining two teams, we create a new team to focus on a specific feature or customer group.

In my experience, frameworks, like agile methods, are crucial to guide our work, but we must avoid rigid processes. Teams should be able to customize their workflows within company tools. We should empower teams to make decisions within their area, and leaders should focus on providing support. Dependencies are best handled with clear communication and tools like service mesh technologies. For instance, teams should be able to choose their tools within company guidelines.

I’ve found that building a culture of open communication is essential. We should use collaboration tools and hold regular knowledge-sharing sessions at team, domain, and company levels. We need to create a centralized knowledge base possibly with an AI-powered search tool, so people can easily find and summarize information. We must define clear communication flows between teams.

In my view, leaders should shift from controlling to enabling. They should provide resources, encourage mentoring between team members, and across teams. Creating a shared service platform would help with productivity and efficiency as well. We should encourage experimentation and learning from failures. A company of any size should be data driven and I've seen the best results when we focus on metrics that increase team morale, innovation, and product quality, like employee satisfaction, feature adoption, and the number of experiments. This, combined with regular feedback on deliveries, ensures engagement, solidifies ownership and also might generate additional ideas.

When forming teams, I believe we should primarily look for people with cross-functional skills, adaptability, but most of all for people who fit our culture, being open and honest, helpful and self-motivating. We should hire team leads who enjoy teaching and mentoring, added to those. We need to invest in infrastructure that supports scalability and flexibility, like cloud-based systems and microservices. We should establish internal training programs, peer mentoring, and a culture where sharing knowledge is valued.

For all of this to work, the transformation should start at the top. Leadership needs to understand that change is necessary. We should provide a clear vision and establish governance that balances autonomy with accountability. After having buy-in from the top, the managers on the ground need to be part of the change, part of the growth, part of the vision. They will sew and maintain the web, binding the scaled atomic structure together. We should then create a framework to provide training for existing employees and communicate the benefits of the new approach.

So how should you approach this? In my experience, it’s best to start with a pilot team and refine our approach as we go. This mitigates the risk of delivery fluctuation and can be best communicated to users. There could even be a test group created from the closest customers who could work closely with the pilot team for quick feedback loops and brainstorming.

Companies like Spotify, Amazon, and Netflix have shown that this approach works. Spotify uses squads, tribes, chapters, and guilds. Amazon uses two-pizza teams and microservices. Netflix focuses on freedom and responsibility.

Imagine your own company’s journey. How would you structure your teams? What challenges would you expect? What metrics would you use? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Scaling with atomic teams, in my belief, lets you keep the energy and innovation of a startup as you grow. By replicating small, autonomous teams, you avoid the problems of traditional scaling. I encourage you to try this approach. Start with a pilot team, embrace autonomy, and share your experiences. Create a checklist to help you. Explore how companies like Spotify, Amazon, and Netflix have done it. The future of growth, I believe, is in empowered teams and a culture of innovation.

Gabor Banszki