Engineering Across Two Continents

Engineering Manager to Director of Engineering·2024·2 years·4 min read

Grew from a single 7-person team to 4 distributed teams across the Philippines and Boston, improving engineering productivity 35%. The company was acquired by Razor Group in 2024.

Overview

Built and scaled the engineering organization behind a multi-channel consumer products portfolio of 3,500+ items, growing it from a single team into a company-wide, metrics-driven development process by the time of the acquisition.

Problem

Engineering supported cross-functional initiatives spanning manufacturing, shipping, distribution, advertising, and pricing for a fast-growing product portfolio, but had no standardized development process, and the team was split across two continents and time zones with no shared operating rhythm.

Constraints

  • Team split across the Philippines and Boston, with limited daily overlap.
  • Process changes had to tie back to company-level KPIs, not just engineering metrics.
  • Hiring had to preserve team and culture fit while growing headcount.
  • Tooling and process needed to hold up under new ownership as the company moved toward an eventual sale.

Approach

Standardized a metrics-driven development process inside an agile framework tied directly to company-level KPIs, formalized code review practices to cut inconsistent merge times, and grew the team by 25% as primary hiring manager with an explicit focus on skill and team fit. The organization expanded from a single team to 4, matching the breadth of the cross-functional initiatives it supported.

Key Decisions

Tie engineering process metrics directly to company-level KPIs

Reasoning:

Non-engineering leadership needed to see the return on process investment in terms they already tracked, contribution margin and portfolio efficiency, not engineering-only velocity charts.

Alternatives considered:
  • Track standard agile velocity and burndown metrics only.

Formalize a single code review process across the organization

Reasoning:

Merge times were inconsistent from team to team and were blocking releases. A single standard, applied company-wide, cut average time to merge to 2 days.

Alternatives considered:
  • Leave code review process to individual team discretion.

Hire for team and skill fit over raw hiring speed

Reasoning:

Teams split across two continents needed strong fit to function without constant daily oversight across the time zone gap.

Alternatives considered:
  • Prioritize faster hiring to fill open reqs sooner.

Tech Stack

  • Django
  • Python
  • REST APIs
  • Agile/Scrum

Result & Impact

  • 25% headcount growth as primary hiring manager
    Team growth
  • +35% via a standardized, metrics-driven process
    Engineering productivity
  • 2 days average, ~90 merge requests per month
    Time to merge
  • 1 team to 4 teams across the Philippines and Boston
    Team structure

The standardized process and distributed team structure held through the company's acquisition by Razor Group in 2024, having supported cross-functional initiatives across manufacturing, shipping, distribution, advertising, and pricing for a portfolio of several thousand products.

Learnings

  • Tying engineering metrics to company-level KPIs made the value of process investment legible to non-engineering leadership.
  • Standardizing code review paid for itself quickly once time-to-merge became a shared, trackable number.
  • Distributed teams across time zones need explicit process structure; informal alignment doesn't scale across a 12-hour gap.

Starting Point

The team supporting a fast-growing multi-channel product portfolio started as a single group of 7 engineers, working across 2 to 3 simultaneous initiatives spanning demand forecasting, pricing, ads tooling, and integrations, with no company-wide standard for how engineering work got planned, reviewed, or measured.

Standardizing on Company Terms

Rather than introduce engineering-only process metrics, the standardization effort tied directly into the KPIs company leadership already tracked: contribution margin and efficiency across the product portfolio. That framing made the return on process investment visible to the manufacturing, shipping, advertising, and pricing stakeholders engineering was building for, not just to engineering itself. Formalizing code review across the org, previously handled inconsistently team by team, brought average time to merge down to 2 days against roughly 90 merge requests a month.

Scaling Across Two Continents

As the organization grew, the model expanded from one team to 4, split across the Philippines and Boston. Hiring focused on fit as much as skill, a deliberate call given how little daily overlap the time zone gap allowed. Headcount grew 25% under that approach without sacrificing the team cohesion the distributed structure depended on.

Result

By the time Razor Group acquired the company in 2024, the engineering organization had gone from a single undifferentiated team to 4 teams running a standardized, metrics-driven process, with a 35% improvement in engineering productivity built on a foundation that held up through the transition to new ownership.

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