Solving We're trying to scale our engineering team but everything is breaking for Supply Chain
Expert Fractional CTO Solutions for Supply Chain & Procurement Companies
This problem has significant impact on Supply Chain companies, affecting operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and competitive positioning. Our fractional CTO services provide Supply Chain & Procurement-specific expertise to resolve this challenge quickly and sustainably.
How "We're trying to scale our engineering team but everything is breaking" Impacts Supply Chain
This problem has significant impact on Supply Chain companies, affecting operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and competitive positioning. In the Supply Chain & Procurement sector, this problem manifests differently than in other industries, requiring specialized expertise and industry-specific solutions.
Business Impact
Despite doubling engineering headcount and salary costs, overall output increased only 20-30%. Cost per feature shipped increased dramatically. Missing revenue targets despite significant investment in team growth. Investors questioning engineering efficiency and burn rate. Unable to scale further without fixing fundamental issues.
Supply Chain & Procurement Specific: Revenue loss, customer churn, competitive disadvantage
Team Impact
Confusion about who's working on what and constant duplicate or conflicting work. Junior engineers not getting enough mentorship and guidance. Communication breaking down between subteams. People feeling lost in larger organization and unclear on priorities. Quality declining as coordination overhead prevents proper review and testing.
Supply Chain & Procurement teams face unique pressure and expertise requirements
Leadership Impact
Frustration that hiring more people made problems worse. Spending all time in coordination meetings instead of strategic leadership. Stress from investor questions about engineering efficiency. Second-guessing team growth plans. Concerned about burning runway faster without proportional results. Wondering if you need to replace entire leadership team.
Critical for Supply Chain & Procurement founders and technical leaders
Warning Signs for Supply Chain
Supply Chain & Procurement Red Flag
Inventory accuracy below 95%
Supply Chain & Procurement Red Flag
Demand forecast errors exceeding 15%
Supply Chain & Procurement Red Flag
Supplier integration breaking monthly
General Symptom
Velocity per engineer decreasing as team grows
General Symptom
New hires taking 2-3 months to become productive
Supply Chain & Procurement Compliance Risks
This problem can jeopardize critical compliance requirements for Supply Chain & Procurement companies:
Our Supply Chain & Procurement-Specific Approach
We combine deep Supply Chain & Procurement industry expertise with proven problem-solving methodologies to deliver solutions that work in your specific context.
Solution Framework
Team scaling fails when you try to operate a 20-person team like a 5-person team. Successful scaling requires: architectural modularity enabling independent team work, clear team structure with appropriate ownership, technical leadership hierarchy (tech leads, senior engineers, architects), scalable processes for code review, deployment, and communication, and excellent onboarding enabling rapid productivity. We've scaled dozens of engineering teams and know exactly which changes to make at each team size milestone.
For Supply Chain & Procurement companies, we adapt this approach to account for industry-specific challenges including inventory optimization, demand forecasting, and more.
Implementation Timeline
Team Scaling Assessment and Structure Design
We assess your current team structure, processes, architecture, and bottlenecks to understand why scaling isn't working. We design an appropriate team structure for your size: typically 2-3 feature teams of 4-6 people each, with clear ownership boundaries, appropriate technical leadership roles (tech leads, senior engineers), and reporting structure. We create a scaling roadmap addressing architecture, processes, tooling, and hiring. You'll get a clear blueprint for how your 15-20 person team should operate effectively.
2-3 weeks
Supply Chain & Procurement optimizedImplement Team Structure and Technical Leadership
We reorganize into properly-sized teams with clear ownership, identify or hire tech leads for each team providing necessary technical leadership, establish communication and coordination mechanisms between teams, create appropriate forums (architecture review, tech leads sync, demo days), and clarify decision-making authority and escalation paths. We ensure each team has the leadership, ownership, and autonomy to move fast without constant coordination with other teams. This usually unlocks 30-40% improvement in velocity within 4-6 weeks.
4-6 weeks
Supply Chain & Procurement optimizedArchitectural Modularity and Infrastructure Scaling
We refactor architecture to enable team independence: clearly bounded services or modules owned by specific teams, well-defined interfaces between team domains, independent deployment capabilities reducing cross-team dependencies, and comprehensive testing enabling confident autonomous changes. We scale infrastructure and tooling: CI/CD systems that handle increased load, improved testing parallelization and speed, better development environments and documentation, and monitoring/observability for larger system. This enables teams to work in parallel without stepping on each other.
8-12 weeks
Supply Chain & Procurement optimizedScalable Processes and Cultural Practices
We implement processes that scale beyond 15-20 engineers: streamlined onboarding that gets people productive in 2-3 weeks, distributed code review processes not dependent on specific people, asynchronous communication reducing meeting overhead, clear roadmap planning and prioritization frameworks, knowledge sharing systems (tech talks, documentation, pairing), and career development frameworks that work at scale. We establish cultural practices and rituals that maintain cohesion and alignment as the team grows further.
3-6 months
Supply Chain & Procurement optimizedTypical Timeline
2-3 weeks assessment, 4-6 weeks initial restructuring, 3-6 months to fully scale processes and architecture
For Supply Chain & Procurement companies
Investment Range
$18k-$35k/month (justified by unlocking productivity from your existing $150k-$300k monthly engineering salary cost)
Typical for Supply Chain & Procurement engagement
What You Get: Supply Chain & Procurement-Specific Deliverables
Comprehensive assessment of we're trying to scale our engineering team but everything is breaking in supply chain context
Supply Chain & Procurement-specific solution roadmap with timeline and milestones
Technical architecture recommendations tailored to your industry
Implementation plan with risk mitigation strategies
Inventory optimization algorithm and demand forecasting model improvement
Vendor management portal and supplier integration architecture
Blockchain traceability implementation and supply chain visibility dashboard
Supply Chain & Procurement Tech Stack Expertise
Our fractional CTOs have extensive experience with the technologies your Supply Chain & Procurement company uses:
languages
frameworks
databases
Success Metrics for
When we solve "We're trying to scale our engineering team but everything is breaking" for Supply Chain & Procurement companies, you can expect:
Improvement in key performance metrics
To full resolution and sustainability
Supply Chain & Procurement compliance maintained
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Learn about Supply Chain & Procurement solutions →Ready to Solve We're trying to scale our engineering team but everything is breaking in Your Supply Chain & Procurement Company?
Get expert fractional CTO guidance with deep Supply Chain & Procurement expertise. Fast resolution from $2,999/mo.