I am going to double the size of my team and go slower.

That’s what I told my leadership when I pitched a proposal to add offshore capacity to my team.

My 7-person team was maxed out supporting a big enterprise initiative while maintaining our regular work. To meet our delivery timelines we’d need to add more capacity. With limited budget, I proposed adding an offshore team of 8. Once the team was hired, I knew we’d have to spend time teaching the new people how things work. That would take my team’s time away from delivery. So I built a slowdown into the plan with an estimate of 30 to 35% impact on velocity.

My leaders were in shock. It was a fair reaction. More people should equal more speed.

I reassured my leaders the dip was temporary and we’d have to go slow early in order to go fast later.

Growing means slowing down first. It’s better to plan, get everyone’s agreement and keep the slowdown short than explain it later.

A dip guaranteed

We knew from the beginning there would be impacts. It is very difficult to bring new people up to speed without spending time with them. The experts in the existing team have to take the time to teach the new team.

There are a few activities the current team would add to their work, like knowledge transfer, mentoring, documentation and code review. Adding this work meant they would stop work on their current priorities so they could explain to the new team members. We forecasted that 30 to 35% of planned shipments would be delayed.

The cost

To effectively add the team the plan was structured into 3 phases. The pre-launch phase (45 days) where the team was reviewing documentation, making updates and storing it centrally. Interviews started and the new team was hired.

The next phase was launch (30 days). The new team was onboarded, access was granted and they were ready to start. The teams started to meet and work through the training plan.

Then began stabilization (60-90 days). This is when the time spent training was planned to reduce and the work delivery would increase until the new team was self-sufficient.

Buy in

Some think that you only have to make your case to leadership and if they approve you are good to go. You really have multiple groups that need to buy in to be successful. In our case, I had three.

Leadership

Leaders worried we did not have time or money to support delays. It took some time, additional conversation and a detailed explanation of the impact dedicated training time would have on delivery to gain their approval.

Stakeholders

Next I met with stakeholders to reset their expectations. They had built their plans around our delivery roadmap and change would mean delayed launches and a longer time horizon to realize promised business value.

Our business stakeholders understood that there would be delays. Deliveries would slow down and the team would focus on the critical and high-priority items until the new team was up to speed. This meant they would need to adjust their corresponding business plan to match and accept that they would not meet 30 to 35% of business expectations for 2 months.

My team

Probably the most difficult conversations were with my team. I started the conversation in our 1 on 1 meetings. I floated the idea and let them react. I collated their concerns and identified themes.

“Are we training our replacements?”

“How am I going to get my work done and train new people?”

“What if something is done wrong or breaks, will we get blamed?”

Then I drafted a plan for onboarding and bringing the new people up to speed that addressed their concerns. I presented in our team meeting and allowed them all to provide feedback. Then I built their feedback into the plan. They had a voice, which made them feel like they were owners of the plan rather than having it dropped in their laps.

We got it wrong

Reality caught up to us in sprint 1. The actual impact was a 60% slowdown. In hindsight there are a few things I’d do differently next time.

We underestimated the hours required to train the new staff because they knew the systems but not how we used them. Most of the training was on business context and rules. This doubled the training time required. Three factors made it worse.

• We did not have any training ready when the new team started. Next time I would plan to build the training during hiring.
• We started the new team together on the same timeline. Next time I would stagger the start and use a train-the-trainer model, where we train the local leads and they handle some of the training on site in the new location.
• We did not account for time zones. Our new team was several time zones away which shrank the training windows. Next time I would record trainings so they are available on demand from day one, while the US team sleeps.

Mike Tyson famously said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Not all bad

I know it is cliché, but I think the most important part is not how you fail, but how you recover and persevere.

Because we had the plan and we knew there was going to be a dip in delivery velocity, we agreed on metrics and tracking mechanisms ahead of time. We knew velocity was key. The team was worried about defects slipping through. We were training new people so we needed to understand how well it landed. We wanted to make sure the team was happy so satisfaction and retention were important. Finally we tracked incident response.

Our observations and data capture allowed us to review and make decisions backed by the data. Although velocity dropped by 60% we were able to explain why and deploy countermeasures that would allow us to improve over time. One of those was to start recording the training sessions so they could be reviewed later when questions arose, without asking the US team. Another was being intentional about the training, developing lessons and protecting calendars. It took about 10 weeks to stabilize. We were above our baseline by 25% by the end of the quarter and nearly double shortly after that.

My seasoned team in the US understood the new team was there to help, not replace them. They now had more time to think strategically and to tackle more challenging problems. They were able to split time across initiatives and our portfolio without burning out. The additional talent in another part of the world enabled them to collaborate and transfer tickets across time zones so we could go even faster.

Growth always means disruption, which impacts speed. Planning for it, communicating it and agreeing to it beforehand gives the dip room to evolve. The agreement allows you to work through the slowdown without explaining it in every status update. Making adjustments midway through is key to managing and reducing the length of the dip.

Double your team and go slower. Make sure to get everyone to agree to the slowdown first.

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Have you ever had to sell a slowdown to grow your team? Or been the one asked to train the new people while still hitting your deadlines? I’d love to hear which conversation was hardest for you: leadership, stakeholders or your own team, and what you’d plan for differently next time. Connect with me on LinkedIn or Substack to continue the conversation.