Tech Due Diligence TEAM-2: Engineering Team Structure and Capabilities

Define your team structure and make it visible. Document the organisational chart with reporting relationships, team composition, role definitions and expectations at each level, and the reasoning behind the current structure. Aim for a healthy seniority distribution. A well-balanced team typically looks like 20-30% senior engineers setting technical direction and mentoring, 40-50% mid-level engineers delivering features independently, and 20-30% junior engineers growing under guidance. A mostly junior team creates execution risk. An all-senior team may signal difficulty scaling. Ensure you have coverage across all required technical domains. For a typical SaaS company, that means frontend engineering, backend/API development, database and data engineering, infrastructure and DevOps, security (at least part-time or shared), and QA/testing. Identify gaps and address them through hiring or targeted training. Choose a team topology that fits your product architecture. For smaller teams under 15 people, a single cross-functional team usually works well. As you grow, consider feature teams aligned to product areas with end-to-end capability, platform teams providing shared services and infrastructure, and enabling teams that support others with specialised skills. Track team health through meaningful metrics: velocity trends (stable or improving), annual turnover rate (below 15% is healthy), employee satisfaction, time to productivity for new hires, and the ratio of planned to unplanned work. Maintain a skills matrix mapping team members to technical competencies. This helps you spot gaps, plan training, and verify that critical skills are not concentrated in single individuals.