Scaling Fast: Software Engineering Through the Hockeystick

What happens when your startup hits the hockey stick?

Customers are flooding in, deadlines are relentless, and your engineering team is drowning in technical debt. Scaling isn’t optional-it’s survival.

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 going from zero to 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.

If you liked Accelerate, The Phoenix Project, Team Topologies, or The Lean Startup, Scaling Fast is your engineer’s playbook for surviving-and thriving-in hypergrowth.

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.

Early praise for Scaling Fast:

＂Scaling Fast is a superb introduction to Software Engineering. It covers the soft skills necessary to execute on a high-functioning team, as well as coding skills necessary to ship well-designed features. I can’t recommend it strongly enough.＂

Adam Rackis

Software Engineer & Author

＂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.＂

Kyle Mathews

Founder of Gatsby and ElectricSQL

＂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.＂

Bas Steins

Engineering Leader