Scaling engineering organizations requires balancing rapid headcount growth with bottom-up product discovery. During a period of massive investment in Facebook Groups, the organization expanded from 150 to over 600 engineers, driven by leadership's mandate to prioritize community-building. A central challenge involved merging the complex data models of Facebook Groups and Pages, a gnarly multi-year migration affecting integrity, ads, and product layers. To break a deadlock in decision-making, a "technical design competition" was utilized, where senior tech leads were split into teams to whiteboard architectures simultaneously. This exercise revealed an 80% overlap in designs, highlighting the viable path forward and isolating specific technical risks for further investigation. Effective large-scale scoping relies on time-boxing efforts to avoid getting lost in infinite details, utilizing AI tools for codebase mapping, and presenting experts with straw-man designs to elicit actionable feedback rather than open-ended input.
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