What happens when your startup hits the hockey stick?
Customers are flooding in, deadlines feel relentless, and your engineering team is drowning in technical debt. Scaling isn't optional—it's survival.
Your engineer's playbook for surviving—and thriving—in hypergrowth
In Scaling Fast: Software Engineering Through the Hockeystick, veteran startup engineer Swizec Teller shares hard-won lessons from leading teams through hypergrowth. From women's health startups scaling to nine-figure Series B rounds to biotech platforms hitting eight-figure revenue in just three years, this is a practical guide to thriving when demand explodes.
You'll learn how to:
- Scale the business without losing product–market fit
- Grow teams with trust, delegation, and high-output culture
- Balance speed, quality, and technical debt
- Use feature flags, small-a agile, and continuous delivery to keep shipping
- Know when to let small fires burn—and when to fix them fast
- Architect your code to increase velocity and reduce bugs
Drawing on real startup war stories, this book shows what works (and what doesn't) when your company is growing faster than your systems can handle.
Who is this book for?
Whether you're an engineer on your first rocket ship, a tech lead managing rapid growth, or a founder scaling without breaking everything, this book will help you navigate chaos, build resilient systems, and keep moving forward.
If you liked Accelerate, The Phoenix Project, Team Topologies, The Lean Startup, Scaling Fast is your next essential read.
Watch the Conference Talk
See the ideas from this book in action. This talk covers the core concepts of scaling software engineering teams through hypergrowth.
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What readers are saying
Early praise from engineering leaders and founders
"One of the most important skillsets in a career in tech startups is scaling yourself through hypergrowth — there is no greater wealth engine in Silicon Valley when you get it right, and there is no other skillset more underestimated by developers who rather fixate on pure code. This is the first book I've seen focused on helping you scale the business, scale the team, and scale the tech in your next startup, from someone who's now done it twice!"
"Congrats on PMF. Now don't blow it. Swizec is a grizzled veteran of the surreal PMF terrain where opportunity and danger lurk. He's created the field guide that shows you how to keep your head, keep your customers, and turn traction into lasting strength."
"The year is 2025, and somehow Swizec Teller wrote a tech book without a single YAML deployment snippet or AI hype cycle diagram. Instead, Scaling Fast brings us something far more valuable: a practical, honest, and often funny guide to what actually makes fast-growing software companies succeed — people, teams, and a bit of architectural sanity."
"When your projects find their market and it's time to scale a few orders of magnitude, this is the book for you"
"As a recent IC-turned-engineering manager at a fast-growing company, I've found this book invaluable! Since reading it, I've ruthlessly cut back on the amount of parallel work streams and soloist developers, and focused on having everyone work as a team. We're getting more done, and I have more confidence in handing off more authority and autonomy to the team."
"Your book has become one of my favorite books on engineering teams. It's right alongside The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. If that book teaches you how to build trust in a team, your book teaches how to get work done. As I was reading through the book, I saw every mistake I made over the years (and how stressful it got at times). You have then explained in simple words how to fix that too. That's another thing I loved about your book. You didn't make it verbose and explain an idea to death by multiple lengthy examples like some of the other books. It was crisp, on point and delivered the message."
What You'll Learn
A comprehensive guide covering business strategy, team management, and technical architecture for hypergrowth
Preface
How scale happens
Scaling the Business
- •Why the business must grow
- •Even the best engineering can't beat market forces
- •Business metrics you should know
Scaling the Team
- •A team will beat any soloist
- •Delegate decisions not just tasks
- •Let juniors speak first
- •Be Small-a agile
- •Work in Progress kills your progress
- •Approve with comment
- •Discuss before coding
- •Use vertical teams
- •Get us over the water, not build us a bridge
- •Weeks of programming saves you hours of planning
- •Keep shipping with feature flags
Scaling the Tech
- •First, just get it done
- •Solve the problem, not a different more difficult problem
- •Use natural abstractions
- •Focus on architectural complexity
- •Avoid the big ball of mud
- •Observe your code break
- •You do have time to build it twice
- •Better is good
- •Let small fires burn
- •Make mistakes easy to fix
- •Software only moves forward
- •Write useful tests
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Sources
140+ sources across academic papers, industry essays, and talks
Coming Fall 2025
Pre-order information will be available soon. Sign up below to be notified when the book launches.
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