Welcome to Building PointFive, a series where we explore what it takes to create a high-performing engineering organization. At PointFive, engineering is at the heart of delivering impactful products and driving innovation. Throughout this series, we’ll share insights, principles, and lessons learned from building our engineering organization—tactics you can apply to your teams, whether in a startup or an established enterprise.
Our goal is to demystify the process of building an engineering organization that meets today’s challenges and is prepared for the future. We’ll break it all down step by step, from culture to processes and from vision to execution. Let’s start by understanding the company behind the engineering organization.
When it comes to building an engineering organization, there’s no “right way”. Success is not binary and instead depends on context, company needs, and the challenges at hand. Over the years, I’ve found that a clear guiding framework can make all the difference. It’s important to note that these are our lessons learned—insights we’ve gathered on our journey. Life is a continuous learning path, and building a great engineering organization is no exception. We’re committed to evolving and adapting, always striving to improve. In this post series, we’ll dive into what it takes to build a thriving engineering organization within an early stage startup..
At its core, the engineering organization’s purpose is to build, deliver, and maintain the company’s technical products. To start, we need to step back and understand what makes the company unique and what drives its success.
The first step in building an engineering organization is understanding the company’s vision. A company’s vision is its North Star—the ultimate goal it aims to achieve. It’s the company's purpose, and why it exists – it inspires those connected to it.
For example, at PointFive, our vision is:
“Promote organizational health and sustainability by making cloud cost efficiency a core engineering principle.”
This vision might not resonate with everyone, and that’s okay. The vision is intended to speak directly to a range of stakeholders—prospects, customers, employees, and investors—who share a commitment to cost efficiency as a core engineering principle. For a consumer-focused company like Google, their vision, "to provide access to the world’s information in one click" (reference), casts a wide net and inspires a larger audience.
Why is starting with the vision important? Because the vision should rarely change. It represents not only the company’s present, but also its future, and building an organization aligned with it in mind means your organization remains relevant as the company evolves and scales.
As champions of cloud cost efficiency, we practice what we preach, and one of our lead engineers (turned team lead), Or Chen, wrote a detailed blog post on how we’re staying efficient ourselves.
Next, it’s essential to focus on the company’s mission. Unlike the vision, the mission is grounded in action—it outlines how the company's day-to-day activities move it closer to the vision.
At PointFive, our mission is:
"To enable continuous cloud cost efficiency through deeper detection and collaborative remediation."
For Google, their mission is:
"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Both examples highlight how the mission provides a practical framework for day-to-day operations. It ensures that every team, including the engineering organization, knows its role, and uses a similar framework to achieve the company’s current goals.
Finally, understanding the company’s values is critical. Values represent the guiding principles and beliefs that shape how the company recruits, makes decisions, and cultivates its culture.
For instance, at PointFive, our values are (reference):
Take 'Raise the Bar' as an example of how our values come to life: We don’t aim for perfection every time, and we never criticize when a solution isn’t perfect. Instead, we focus on progress and celebrate every improvement or setback, as long as we learn more and move forward.Values are crucial in larger organizations, where communication can become siloed as the company grows. Shared values ensure alignment by creating a common language and framework for decision-making. They also help attract individuals who share the same core values, which fosters a cohesive culture. Importantly, sharing core values doesn’t mean a lack of diversity—on the contrary, it provides a foundation where diverse perspectives, skills, and experiences can thrive. By aligning on principles like trust, collaboration, or innovation, teams can embrace different viewpoints while working toward the same overarching goals.
Before diving into the specifics of structuring an engineering organization, we must start by zooming out and understanding the company itself. The vision, mission, and values are the foundation upon which the organization is built. They ensure that every decision, process, and structure aligns with the company’s long-term goals. More than that, shared values act as a beacon, attracting individuals who resonate with them—people who are not only aligned with our goals but are inspired to contribute their unique perspectives and skills. If these values speak to you, perhaps you belong here too.
In our next post, we’ll explore how to use these foundational elements to create strategic guidelines for the engineering organization. These guidelines will define the conditions under which the organization can thrive and deliver its best work.
