---
title: "How Shopify Scales Up Its Development Teams"
description: "The article argues that scaling development is primarily about creating more effective teams, not simply increasing headcount. It first recommends checking whether an existing team prioritizes impactful work, minimizes supporting activity, and can ship code quickly while finding bugs; otherwise hiring may be premature. Shopify organizes product work into problem spaces and teams of five to nine, uses a multi-step process combining technical exercises with cultural assessment, and aims for at least as many onboarded members as onboarding members. New teams receive a baseline for work practices and technology, while transparent technical design, shared tooling with dashboards and embedded quality and testing standards, optional pairing, and frequent retrospectives support consistency and learning. The conclusion is that these practices, rather than hiring alone, enable development teams to scale more effectively."
---

# How Shopify Scales Up Its Development Teams

[Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify) · 2023-10-18 · Sep 26, 2019

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

The article argues that scaling development is primarily about creating more effective teams, not simply increasing headcount. It first recommends checking whether an existing team prioritizes impactful work, minimizes supporting activity, and can ship code quickly while finding bugs; otherwise hiring may be premature. Shopify organizes product work into problem spaces and teams of five to nine, uses a multi-step process combining technical exercises with cultural assessment, and aims for at least as many onboarded members as onboarding members. New teams receive a baseline for work practices and technology, while transparent technical design, shared tooling with dashboards and embedded quality and testing standards, optional pairing, and frequent retrospectives support consistency and learning. The conclusion is that these practices, rather than hiring alone, enable development teams to scale more effectively.

## Context

Hiring can reduce productivity in the short term, and growing effective teams is difficult. The article says organizations should first verify that existing teams prioritize impactful work, minimize supporting activities, and can ship code quickly while finding bugs before adding people.

## Approach / What changed

Shopify maps its broad product domain into problem spaces, product areas, and teams of five to nine people. It combines a structured hiring process with team baselines, open technical design, shared development tooling, pairing, and frequent retrospectives to build and improve effective teams.

## Takeaways

- Shopify’s product development teams typically contain five to nine people with complementary roles including product management, back-end and web development, data, and UX.
- Shopify aims for each team to have at least as many fully onboarded members as members still onboarding, reflecting the roughly one-year period needed to gain business and product context.
- Shared tooling codifies code-quality and testing standards through a development pipeline and dashboards, while pairing and externally facilitated retrospectives reinforce learning and continuous improvement.

**Tags:** [Developer Experience](https://yomu.fyi/topic/developer-experience), [Hiring](https://yomu.fyi/topic/hiring), [Onboarding](https://yomu.fyi/topic/onboarding), [Testing](https://yomu.fyi/topic/testing)

- Source: [Shopify](https://shopify.engineering/how-shopify-scales-up-its-development-teams)
- Source URL: https://shopify.engineering/how-shopify-scales-up-its-development-teams
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-31T01:13:52.923Z

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