7 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Scaling Your Dev Team

Growing your dev team is an exciting and big step. Hiring more people to add to your team means more progress, right? Well, unfortunately, this is not always the case. Scaling too quickly or without having a clear plan can cause more harm than good, slow things down, and lead to frustration on both sides. 

We’ve seen companies make the same mistakes over and over again when it comes to team scaling. The most common ones include unclear roles, poor communication, or simply just hiring too fast, resulting in a messy project. 

Let’s go over the seven most common mistakes to watch out for when you decide to scale your dev team and share some tips to avoid them. 

1. Hiring Too Fast, Without a Plan

When things start piling up, it can be tempting to immediately bring in more people. It’s actually the obvious solution for most companies. When you’re swamped and have some tight deadlines to meet, hiring more people can definitely help. But if you’re hiring just for the sake of hiring, without a clear plan, you will probably end up with more problems than you had before. This is a mistake we have seen quite a few times, where teams grow fast without knowing exactly who they need and why. They add three new developers and then suddenly realize no one knows who’s doing what. Unclear tasks and responsibilities will only cause more mess, and the existing team will spend more time helping the new hires than building anything. 

What helps: Before you post that job ad, think about what you actually need help with. Do you need extra hands with front-end work? Testing? Maybe the project is stuck because of unclear priorities, not a lack of people? When you are clear on what issues need solving, you will be able to determine what kind of help to get, and that’s where something like staff augmentation or a dedicated software development team can really make sense.

2. Ignoring Team Communication

As more people join your team, communication can get harder. When there are only 2 or 3 people in your team, everyone knows what’s going on and it’s easy to stay aligned. But as your team grows, and suddenly you’ve got 5, 6, or more people, communication challenges can occur. When people in your team are not regularly communicating and checking in, it can lead to confusion or misunderstandings. You don’t want to end up working on the same feature without realizing it or push a big change without letting your team know. 

What helps: You don’t have to overdo with meetings, but make sure people are talking, and everyone is up-to-date with everything. This can look like a short daily check-in, or a quick Slack message can go a long way. Keep tasks visible and organized for everyone, with tools like Trello, Jira, or even a shared doc can work. It doesn’t need to be formal, just choose a method that works best for your team and keeps everyone aligned. 

3. Skipping Onboarding

When new team members are about to join your team, having a good onboarding process can make everyone’s lives easier. Because simply going through their tasks and expecting them to deliver results just won’t work. We get it you are busy, and so is your team. But investing some effort into onboarding can save you time or even money along the way. Your new team member might have to figure things out on their own or start breaking stuff by accident. Neither is great. 

What helps: Have a basic onboarding setup. Don’t think anything fancy, just a README with clear instructions for setup steps, a list of key tools, and who to ask in case they get stuck. If you have the capacity it’s even better to assign a “go-to person” to them for the first weeks. A little structure in onboarding can make things much easier for you and your new team member also. 

4. Not Defining Roles Clearly

With smaller teams of only a few people, team members often wear many hats, managing more responsibilities. This can be okay and work for a while. But as your team grows, defining a clear software development team structure should become a priority.

It can cause a bit of chaos, resulting in more developers working on the same ticket without realizing it, or even avoiding some tasks, because they assume someone else is handling it. Meanwhile, nobody’s actually doing it. This just creates confusion and slows things down. 

What helps: When you start to hire more people, make it clear from the beginning who’s responsible for what. This doesn’t mean locking people into rigid roles. Of course, there can be flexibility, but the core responsibilities should be set from the start to avoid overlap and confusion. 

5. Forgetting About Culture Fit

Ever worked with someone who had great tech skills but just didn’t click with the team? That’s a tough situation.   
Companies often overlook cultural fit when hiring new people, especially when they need help fast. But if you don’t pay attention to how someone fits into your team, things can get awkward fast. This can be due to different working and communication styles or not taking feedback well, among others. And it makes things harder than they need to be.

What helps: Skills and knowledge are obviously very important when you are looking to hire new people for your project. But make sure to also focus on how new potential team members solve problems, how they communicate, and overall, if they are a good cultural fit in your team. 

6. Overlooking Code Quality & Standards

When trying to move and take care of everything fast, it’s easy to let some things slide. This can look like leaving stuff for later, missing some tests, and telling yourself you will deal with them another time. This can cause a mess, and an even bigger mess with new people joining your team. 

If every developer follows different coding styles and standards for their work, nobody will understand what anyone else wrote. And fixing bugs will turn into detective work. 

What helps: Set some basic working standards for your team to follow. Nothing too crazy, just enough to make sure everyone is working in the same direction. These can be things such as code style, commit messages, or testing rules. Anything that helps your team avoid creating a mess and stay on the same page at all times. 

7. Trying to Manage It All Alone

With a small team, it makes sense that you have a lot of stuff to handle daily: hiring, code reviews, planning, etc. But when you start growing, doing it all alone can lead to burnout. 

We've seen leads stretched so thin they barely had time to code anymore. Decisions got delayed, pull requests piled up, and team morale dropped because nobody was getting enough feedback or direction.

What helps: Start sharing the load early. Train team leads, delegate reviews, or bring in more people to help out with project management or with the skills you need. A growing team means growing how you manage as well. 

Conclusion

We know how scaling a team can be challenging, especially if you’re juggling many other responsibilities too. These are the most common mistakes we’ve seen companies and managers make when it comes to scaling. 

But with some good planning, and setting the basics like clear roles and code standards, you will avoid a lot of headaches down the road. Keep in mind that having a bigger team won’t equal better productivity or efficiency without some upfront effort. 

Be smart, not just fast, when it comes to scaling your team, and your future self will thank you.