Models for scaling R&D organizations

Many companies are starting small and then experiencing the pain of scale, when they need to grow R&D from 10s to 100s and beyond. Why scaling is painful?

Small organization are usually intuitively and evolutionary structured. It can work very well, but it doesn't scale. Building a large R&D organization requires careful design and proper consideration of primary tradeoffs: business context vs. professional context; shared reusable components and infrastructure vs. distributed redundant development; development velocity vs. field quality; uniform policies and workflows vs. autonomous tailored workflows, and more.

How do you design your organization for scale? How do you weigh into the critical questions and make the proper tradeoffs for your team?

In this talk I will share my experience and advices of how to make the proper tradeoffs given the characteristics and challenges of the business and technology. As a heads up for the session, I always ranked development velocity as a premium value.