Splitting engineering teams into defense and offense

Our conversation partner, Daksh, the co-founder of Greptile, discusses their approach to structuring a small engineering team. They have found that by dedicating half the engineers to "long-running" tasks and the other half to protecting those teams from distractions, they can achieve remarkable productivity gains. This approach allows for uninterrupted focus on complex projects, while also maintaining a stable product through defensive engineering work. By isolating interruptions to a few people, Daksh's team is able to optimize their workflow, with long-running processes correlating more strongly with customer acquisition and retention, and event-driven engineering focusing on maintenance and support.