The Three Walls Every Engineering Team Hits Between 5 and 50 Engineers
Reading time: 4min
Many engineering teams thinks their chaos is unique. (Spoiler: It's not).
Between 5 and 50 engineers, most companies slam into a few predictable walls. The exact numbers vary. Remote teams hit them earlier, colocated ones later. But the patterns repeat often enough to be worth watching for.
Think of this less as precise math and more as a field guide of common inflection points. The walls might appear at 8 or 15, 30 or 50, but they will appear. The earlier you spot them, the faster you can break through.
Wall #1: The Communication Wall (often ~8–15 engineers)
At five people, nobody needs process. At eight, if you are remote, cracks start showing. At fifteen, even colocated teams feel it.
This is the point where shared awareness collapses. Everyone used to know everything. Now, product-impacting decisions happen in parallel, but not always in alignment.
It feels like: "Wait, why does onboarding position a feature one way, while the dashboard positions it another way?"
The real danger isn't duplication, it's divergence. Different teams make product choices that unintentionally pull the experience in opposite directions. Maybe one team optimizes sign-up flow for conversion while another optimizes onboarding for clarity, and suddenly the two don't fit together.
Why it's different from coordination: Communication is about awareness. Even knowing these decisions are happening. Coordination (the next wall) is about executing smoothly once you have that awareness.
Classic symptom: The org ends up with conflicting user experiences, because product choices were made in isolation.
How to break through:
- Establish lightweight rituals: daily standups, weekly updates, decision logs.
- Over-document decisions, even ones that feel obvious.
- Repeat key messages until you feel like a broken record, because that is usually when they are actually landing.
Wall #2: The Coordination Wall (often ~20–30 engineers)
Okay, everyone's aware. Now comes the harder part: working together without stepping on each other's toes.
This wall shows up once you have multiple teams. Dependencies multiply. Priorities collide. You’re not shipping slower because of bad code, but because moving the org takes choreography.
It feels like: "We wrote the code in a week. It took a month to unblock, review, and ship it."
Why it happens:
- The first management layers appear: tech leads, EMs. Suddenly, not everyone reports to the founder
- Without clear ownership, teams block each other
- Rapid hiring accelerates the pain. Triple headcount in six months, and this wall hits like a freight train
Classic symptom: Everyone knows a migration or shared system is a blocker, but nobody owns driving it forward.
How to break through:
- Create small, autonomous teams with clear ownership
- Assign a single-threaded leader per project, one owner not three co-owners
- Add process gradually. Start with the lightest version that works:
- RFCs for cross-team decisions
- Quarterly or biannual planning (scaled to your pace)
- A visible dependency board so surprises don't pile up late
Think of communication as knowing where the traffic lights are, and coordination as actually getting cars through the intersection without collisions.
Wall #3: The Culture Wall (becomes unavoidable ~40+ engineers)
Culture drift does not wait until 40. In my experience, the first hints show up around 15 to 20 people, especially once you add managers or contractors. By 40 it is no longer optional. You either steer culture actively or it fragments on its own.
New hires do not know the inside jokes or the founding stories. Different teams begin to feel like distinct subcultures, sometimes pulling in different directions. Early employees often feel like they are losing the family vibe they helped create. Later employees sometimes feel like they are treated as second class, joining a product and culture that others built before them.
It feels like: "Early employees miss the family they built, while later employees feel like they’ll never fully belong."
Why it happens:
- Shared context no longer scales socially.
- Rapid hiring outpaces cultural absorption.
- Distributed teams amplify drift if values are not codified.
Classic symptom: Different groups form their own norms and expectations, which eventually clash.
How to break through:
- Write down your values, but don't stop there.
- Decide who owns culture: founders set direction, managers model it daily, and by ~50+ People/HR reinforces it in hiring, onboarding, and promotions.
- Accept that culture evolves. The goal is not to freeze it, but to guide it so it grows in line with your mission.
Breaking Through
Between 5 and 50 engineers, most teams hit three walls:
- Communication: awareness breaks down.
- Coordination: execution slows down despite awareness.
- Culture: drift becomes unavoidable if left unmanaged.
The timing depends on how you grow: fast vs. slow, remote vs. colocated, founder-led vs. manager-heavy. But the patterns repeat.
Each wall is just proof you've grown, and an invitation to level up how you work.
The best teams don't avoid the walls. They see them coming, and they level up fast enough to break through.
So, which wall is your team facing right now?