Shortly after being asked to lead a third team at a Fortune 100 company, I was asked to spin up a fourth. The third team had worked on a product a while ago that was sitting on the shelf collecting dust. It ran the affiliate marketing analytics. It needed some updating and maintenance.

The task was to create and hire a brand new team that was going to own the affiliate marketing analytics. The team was to dust off the code that had been sitting stagnant for over a year. The work was not going to be over complex, at least not at first. This was a great opportunity to bring on some engineers that were early in their careers that wanted to work with front-end systems and learn about analytics.

To start the new team, I made the decision to bring over some institutional knowledge first. The third team I was managing had a team lead who had worked on the code previously. This was a career growth opportunity. One that made clear sense. They were asked if they would enjoy leading and managing the new team working on the product. Luckily, they accept the challenge.

We got to work on fielding resumes for the four other positions we were going to fill. We decided the majority could be engineers early on in their careers, but we needed one person with a few years of experience that could help lead the team from a technical perspective.

We found our mid-level engineer. That person is now an engineering manager at the company. It goes without saying that this person worked out really well.

We then proceeded to hire three engineers in the first year of their careers. They were all excited about the opportunity.

The team hit the ground running. Within the first week, PRs were being opened. The team formed quickly and became very disciplined. There was room for career growth all around.

The team lead became an engineering manager. The mid-level helped the other three engineers and since has been promoted to engineering manager as well. The three engineers have continued to grow in their careers as engineers.

This was an opportunity where we could identify career growth for existing and new members of the team. We were able to hire junior through senior roles. The right combination came together and was recognized by their peer teams as quickly becoming high performing. It was awesome to see!