December 2025 — When a startup hits true product–market fit, everything changes. Customer demand surges, deadlines accelerate, and engineering teams are pushed to their limits. In Scaling Fast: Software Engineering Through the Hockeystick, veteran engineer, author, and startup leader Swizec Teller offers a front-line guide to navigating those explosive growth moments—without sacrificing velocity, product quality, or team sanity.
Drawing from years scaling engineering organizations in healthtech, edtech, and biotech—from early seed-stage experiments to nine-figure Series B rounds—Teller delivers an unfiltered, story-driven handbook for engineers, tech leads, and founders building companies that grow faster than their systems can keep up.
Scaling Fast teaches readers how to scale a business without losing product–market fit, build high-output teams rooted in trust and autonomy, and make the critical architectural and cultural decisions that allow companies to keep shipping even as complexity multiplies. From using feature flags and continuous delivery to knowing when to let small fires burn, Teller reframes engineering as a business discipline—one where technical decisions directly shape growth, scalability, and organizational resilience.
“At my fastest,” Teller writes, “we grew the engineering team 3x in under a year. The way you write code influences how you can scale your team, and the way you scale your team influences what your code can do.” Scaling Fast fills the gap between business books for founders, management books for leaders, and technical guides for developers—offering a unified framework for surviving hypergrowth with systems and people intact.
Early readers are calling the book “invaluable,” “practical,” and “the first of its kind.” Shawn “Swyx” Wang, founder of Latent Space, says, “This is the first book I’ve seen focused on helping you scale the business, scale the team, and scale the tech in your next startup—from someone who’s done it twice.” Glen Stovall, engineering manager and author, calls it “confidence-building, focused, and transformative for fast-growing teams.”
Ideal for founding engineers, technical founders, and venture-backed teams navigating seed through Series C, Scaling Fast is part playbook, part therapy, and fully grounded in the messy, exhilarating reality of building technology at rocket-ship speed.
Scaling Fast: Software Engineering Through the Hockeystick is available now.
