When I joined Westpac’s data team, we were 20 people in a corner of the office. Five years later, we were over 1,000 people spread across multiple locations. Along the way, I learned some hard lessons about scaling teams while maintaining culture.
The Challenge
Scaling isn’t just about hiring more people. It’s about maintaining the things that made your team special in the first place while adapting to new realities.
At 20 people, everyone knows everyone. Decisions are fast. Communication is easy. Culture is organic.
At 1,000 people, you need structure. Process. Hierarchy. And if you’re not careful, you end up with corporate bloat, bureaucracy, and all the dysfunctions you were trying to avoid.
What We Got Right
Hire for Culture Add, Not Culture Fit
Early on, we realized “culture fit” was just code for “hire people like us.” That’s a recipe for groupthink and stagnation.
Instead, we hired for “culture add”—people who shared our values but brought different perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences.
This made hiring harder but made our team stronger.
Maintain High Standards
The biggest mistake I see in scaling teams is lowering the hiring bar because you need bodies. Don’t do it.
Every hire raises or lowers the average quality of your team. We made the decision to keep standards high, even if it meant slower growth.
Better to be understaffed with great people than fully staffed with mediocre ones.
Create Clear Paths for Growth
As teams grow, people need to see how they can grow with them. We created clear career paths with concrete criteria for advancement.
Not just “be a good engineer”—specific skills, experiences, and impact levels required for each level. This transparency helped people own their development.
What We Got Wrong
Moving Too Fast
There were periods where we grew too quickly. We onboarded 50 people in a month. Our training programs couldn’t keep up. Our culture started to dilute.
We learned to pace growth better—not because of budget constraints, but because of cultural constraints. Culture is fragile at scale.
Not Investing Enough in Leadership
We promoted great individual contributors into leadership roles without training them. Big mistake.
Being a great data scientist doesn’t make you a great manager. We eventually invested heavily in leadership development, but we should have started earlier.
Letting Process Creep In
Every time something went wrong, someone suggested a new process. Before we knew it, we had processes for processes.
We had to periodically do “process audits”—killing any process that couldn’t justify its existence with clear value.
Advice for Others Scaling Teams
- Go slow to go fast - Take time to hire right
- Document your culture - Write down what matters before you forget
- Invest in onboarding - First impressions last
- Create feedback loops - Stay connected to the team as you grow
- Preserve the things that matter - Know what’s core vs. what can change
The Bottom Line
Scaling is hard. You will make mistakes. Your culture will evolve—that’s not bad, it’s inevitable.
The key is being intentional about which parts of your culture are core and must be preserved, and which parts need to evolve as you grow.
At Cochlear, we’re building a data organisation from scratch. We have the luxury of applying these lessons from day one. But the principles are the same: hire great people, maintain standards, and never lose sight of why you’re doing this in the first place.
Your team is your product. Treat it that way.