Software · Software Engineering & Web
Adding four developers to a product team without breaking its velocity during onboarding
A French vendor with an eighteen-month backlog and a market that was not waiting. The challenge was not hiring fast but onboarding without collapsing the existing team's velocity.
- Sector
- Software
- Size
- 85 employees, Series A
- Service
- Software Engineering & Web
- Model
- Dedicated team
- Duration
- 14 months, ongoing
Context
The internal team had seven developers on a Node and React product deployed continuously. Two previous attempts at external reinforcement had ended with a departure after two months.
The problem
- Eighteen-month product backlog at constant capacity
- Two previous failed attempts at external reinforcement, wary team
- Codebase with no onboarding documentation
- Code review already saturated by the seven internal developers
What we did
- Start with two developers, not four, on an isolated functional domain
- Deliberately low-risk first assignment: writing the missing tests on the domain taken over
- Onboarding documentation produced by the newcomers, reviewed by the internal team
- Ramp to four developers after ten weeks, once code review flowed
- An AzerOps tech lead absorbs first-pass review; the internal team only sees pre-reviewed code
- Shared rituals in French, same tooling, same commit conventions
Results
- 10 sem.
- before ramping to 4 profiles
- 0
- departures in 14 months
- +64 %
- more tickets shipped per quarter
- 2
- domains fully taken over
What remains
The internal team's velocity did not drop during onboarding, which was the CTO's stated condition. The two functional domains handed over are now maintained end to end by the AzerOps team, code review included.
« They refused to start with four when we asked for four. In hindsight, that is why it worked this time. »
Stack
- Node.js
- React
- TypeScript
- PostgreSQL
- GitHub Actions