The moment something starts to slip rarely shows up as a big event. It is usually a pull request that sits for days because no one is sure who should review it. Or the third meeting to decide something simple that, a few months ago, would have been solved with a quick Slack conversation. That sense of shared context and speed the team had early on starts to fade. This is the first sign that engineering culture is starting to strain under the weight of growth.
Why good intentions do not scale
Most teams do not start out wanting a confusing or inconsistent culture. The bet is that by hiring good, motivated people, a good culture will emerge on its own. And for a while, this actually works works, especially when the team is small.
But growth introduces friction that this “organic” approach cannot sustain. What happens is the following:
Dependencies between teams multiply. A simple feature now requires coordination across three different teams, each with its own backlog and priorities. What used to be a function call becomes a network request and a service level agreement.
The level of experience also diversifies. The initial group of senior engineers starts working alongside many junior and mid-level developers. The unwritten rules and best practices that everyone “knew” before stop being shared knowledge.
Decision-making spreads without a clear set of principles. More people make decisions every day, but without guidelines, those decisions start to conflict. One team chooses a database technology for a service, while another solves a similar problem with a different tool, creating operational overhead down the line.
Simply expecting new hires to absorb the culture by osmosis is a flawed strategy.
Good intentions do not provide the structure needed to maintain alignment and quality as you scale.
Seeing culture as a system, not an artifact
The alternative is to stop treating culture as an artifact, a manifesto on the wall, and start seeing it as a system that needs to be deliberately designed and cared for. Like any system, it has inputs, processes, and outputs. You can observe what happens day to day, measure the effects, and make targeted adjustments to improve how the team works.
How you can do this:
Inputs
These are the constant changes that affect the system. Think about new team members, large project changes, or organizational restructures. Each new hire can either reinforce or weaken the norms that already exist.
Process
It forms through the team’s daily interactions and routines. How code reviews happen, how technical decisions are made and communicated, how incidents are handled, and even the tone of conversations in pull requests. All of this shapes the process.
Outputs
These are the observable results. You feel them in team health and morale, and you can measure them in things like code quality, bug rates, and product delivery speed.
Where to act and what to observe in engineering culture
When you start to see culture as a system, you begin looking for key leverage points. They are not abstract values, but concrete day to day rituals where culture is reinforced or eroded. The most valuable information comes from listening to friction.
Pay attention to recurring themes in retrospectives. Are people constantly frustrated with slow builds, confusing documentation, or an unclear code review process.
These signals show where the system is under pressure.
Architecting for cultural growth
Building a resilient culture means being intentional about the design of your core engineering processes. It is about creating structures that guide people toward the desired behaviors, especially as the team grows and direct supervision becomes impossible.
Design your core interactions with intention
Instead of letting critical processes happen by chance, define them. This creates consistency and clarity, which are essential for scaling.
Structure technical decision-making.
Use a process like Architecture Decision Records (ADRs). The real value of an ADR is not the document itself, but the process it encourages: clearly articulating the problem, evaluating trade-offs, and creating a record for future team members.
This forces clear thinking and prevents teams from re-litigating the same decisions.
Define good code review practices
What is a good code review in your organization? Is it about blocking changes or is it an opportunity for teaching and knowledge sharing? Set clear expectations.
For example, a review should confirm whether the change aligns with the system architecture, has adequate test coverage, and is understandable for the next person who touches that code.
Build a strong onboarding process
The first 30 days of a new engineer are the highest impact opportunity to transmit culture.
They should immerse the person in how you build software.
Pair them with someone experienced, give them a well-defined initial task, and closely follow their first pull request and deploy. This teaches the system’s norms through practice, not just documentation.
Make culture everyone’s responsibility
A healthy engineering culture cannot be imposed top-down. It needs to be owned and maintained by the people doing the work every day.
Team leaders as cultural references
Tech leads and managers amplify culture in day to day work. They set the tone in code reviews, help keep rituals running, and are the first line of defense when standards start to slip. Give them autonomy and support to act as cultural stewards for their teams.
Build bridges between teams
Communities of practice or guilds, like a backend or observability group, help break down silos. They connect people with similar interests across different teams. These spaces are where shared standards emerge and spread naturally, instead of being imposed.
Distribute responsibility to individuals
Give engineers ownership over specific parts of the engineering system. One person might be responsible for CI pipeline performance, another for documentation quality. This spreads responsibility and enables continuous improvements that benefit the entire team.
Track progress
Finally, culture is a living system. It requires constant maintenance. You cannot define processes, document everything, and move on expecting it to work forever.
Have regular check-ins to take the pulse of the team, such as engineering-focused surveys. Ask objective questions about code review response time, meeting quality, or confidence in the deploy process. The goal is to understand the system’s health day to day.
Most important: use that feedback to act.
Treating culture as ongoing engineering work, just like monitoring performance or paying down technical debt, is what allows it to keep up with team growth instead of breaking under pressure.
