The engineering practices that survive a fast-growing consultancy

As the team passed thirty people, some rituals scaled and some quietly stopped earning their keep. Here is the short list that survived a fast-growing consultancy.

Keep the ones that compound

• Written design notes before non-trivial work.
• Shared libraries for patterns used more than twice.
• Reviews focused on intent, not formatting.

We also deliberately dropped a few things: blanket meetings, process for its own sake, and standards documents nobody read. Less ceremony and more written context was the trade that held up.