Scaling Engineering Leadership in Hyper-growth Environments

Discussion with Martyn Verhaegen

With nearly two decades in logistics technology, Martyn Verhaegen has navigated both the scrappy intensity of startups and the complex realities of leading large, distributed engineering organizations. From founding Qwyk, a digital freight platform later acquired by Magaya, to serving as CTO for Magaya’s global product suite, Verhaegen has built and scaled teams from just a handful of engineers to more than 120. Today, he is once again leading a new venture in logistics software. In this article, he shares hard-earned lessons on how executives should approach scaling engineering leadership, building alignment, and using trust as the ultimate driver of long-term organizational success.

From Startup Founder to Strategic CTO Leadership

In a five-person startup, the founder often does it all—architect, engineer, product owner, and visionary. Verhaegen recalled that this level of involvement worked in the early days but quickly became unsustainable once the startup’s team expanded to over one hundred engineers as it was acquired and integrated into a larger organization.

The solution lay in building a trusted leadership layer. He inherited and reshaped a management team to act as his eyes and ears, creating a structure that allowed him to stay close to strategy without micromanaging execution. “In the small team I was very hands-on, essentially the engineering leader, the architect, and everything that came with it. But when the team grew to over 100 engineers inside a larger organization, my role shifted toward being involved at a strategic level rather than driving every technical detail”, he says. But once he was leading a team of 100 people, that level of direct involvement was no longer possible.

The result was an organization built on mutual trust: leaders relied on him for strategic direction, while he relied on them for execution. For Verhaegen, the transition showed that true leadership is about scaling influence rather than control. Small teams can run on proximity to the founder, but larger ones need clear delegation, alignment mechanisms, and defined ownership of outcomes.

The Challenge of Alignment in Large Engineering Teams

Keeping large teams aligned is among the hardest challenges any leader faces. As Verhaegen emphasized, success goes beyond assigning individual tasks, people must clearly understand how their efforts connect to the company’s broader strategy and ultimate objectives.

The contrast between small and large teams is stark. In a startup, alignment often comes naturally through constant, informal communication. But as organizations scale, misalignment becomes an ever-present risk. “The biggest problem with a large team is keeping everybody aligned. It's making sure everybody knows what they're doing and why they're doing it, and most importantly, what the end goal of it all is”, Verhaegen notes.

To address this, he focused on transparency around trade-offs and customer-driven priorities, ensuring engineers understood why certain features were prioritized. Verhaegen also fostered open conversations so team members seeking context could connect their work to the bigger picture. This combination of clarity and dialogue helped maintain motivation, even when priorities shifted unexpectedly.

The key lesson: alignment is not about rigid coordination, but about keeping purpose visible at all times. When people know why their work matters, they remain adaptable, focused, and resilient in the face of change.

Agile Frameworks and Rituals for Scalable Engineering

Balancing agility with stability requires both structure and flexibility. For Verhaegen, some bureaucracy was inevitable, but the key was to ensure it clarified priorities rather than slowed people down. “Some bureaucracy is always needed. I don't think you could do it without any bureaucracy at all. And some chaos is unavoidable”, he says.

To make this work in practice, he introduced weekly Level 10 meetings with his leadership team. These meetings weren’t routine box-ticking, they became high-value forums where leaders could surface bottlenecks before they escalated, recognize outstanding contributions, resolve customer issues, and track KPIs in context. Managers then replicated the model in their own teams, spreading accountability while keeping meeting time purposeful.

Equally important was product management approach. With a VP of Product who later became CPO, Magaya embedded agile practices such as standups, sprints, and cross-functional collaboration. These rituals not only kept teams on track but also provided a feedback loop that exposed gaps early. Verhaegen, meanwhile, focused his attention on forward-looking questions: What scale are we preparing to reach in two years? What skill sets will we need to hire or develop ahead of time? For him, agility at scale wasn’t about erasing chaos, but about channeling it into momentum and ensuring the organization was ready for what came next.

Breaking Down Silos in Engineering with Product Ownership

Engineering, QA, and IT often drift into silos, but Verhaegen made it a priority to bring them together around shared outcomes. “Create ownership by aligning incentives. For example, instead of holding a QA manager or director accountable only for testing activities, make them responsible for the overall success of the products they are testing”, he says. This shift transfers accountability from narrow tasks to broader outcomes, fostering cross-functional collaboration as people become invested in the overall success of their work.

As a result, QA leaders weren’t only measuring defect counts; they were joining sprint planning sessions and design discussions to flag risks early. IT and engineering also collaborated more closely, anticipating the ripple effects of new features before they reached production. This created richer conversations about quality, timelines, and user impact, conversations that rarely happen in siloed teams.

By tying accountability to outcomes instead of job descriptions, Verhaegen reduced friction and fostered a culture of shared ownership. Teams stopped handing off responsibilities like relay batons and instead worked side by side toward product success.

Balancing Local Decisions with Global Engineering Consistency

One of the hardest balancing acts for any CTO is empowering local decision-making while maintaining enterprise-wide architectural and strategic consistency. Too much control risks bottlenecks; too little results in fragmentation. “It's probably one of the hardest things to not micromanage everything but still get consistent outcomes”, Verhaegen acknowledges. 

For him, the answer lay in clarity paired with accountability. By making both the business and engineering strategy explicit, he gave local teams the freedom to move quickly while still pointing in the same direction. Engineers were motivated to deliver their best work, sometimes pushing beyond scope, but also understood where boundaries lay. Leadership meant stepping in when priorities risked drifting away from strategy, and being clear about why certain trade-offs were made.

The principle was simple: trust teams to execute, but create visibility so deviations are spotted early. Influence at the start and finish of a process, not constant interference.

Trust and Culture in Fast-Growth Engineering

Culture is what holds alignment together, especially in fast-growth environments. At Magaya, expansion was rapid, but the presence of long-tenured employees helped anchor the culture and provide stability during change.

“A defining aspect of my previous role was working at an established company that had rapidly expanded from a much smaller organization”. For Verhaegen, it was fortunate that many long-tenured employees remained with the company, offering crucial continuity during a period of rapid growth.

That continuity gave new hires role models to emulate, but Verhaegen stresses that culture can’t be left on autopilot. Leaders need to nurture it deliberately by staying accessible, communicating openly, and setting the tone through their own behavior. Incentives must also be reviewed regularly to avoid unintended consequences, for example, focusing too narrowly on bug counts might discourage reporting issues honestly. Adjusting these signals keeps teams motivated by the right goals.

Engineering Metrics Trade-Offs and the Pursuit of Product Quality

Managing quality at scale requires both standard frameworks and contextual flexibility. Verhaegen relied on metrics like DORA while calibrating them to each product’s maturity. “I value established metric frameworks such as DORA; however, it is important to remain flexible in their application, as product maturity levels can vary significantly”, he explains.

For newer, cloud-native products, iteration was fast; for legacy systems, usability and bug management required a different lens. Beyond numbers, Verhaegen stayed close to sales, support, and professional services to capture customer sentiment and usability signals that metrics alone could not convey.

On trade-offs, he consistently leaned toward quality over speed. Yet he also recognized perfection as unattainable: “Perfection is unattainable, and it will make you spend infinite money”. Instead, he emphasized communicating trade-offs transparently with executives, ensuring the entire leadership team understood the cost of last-minute feature requests or shifting priorities.

Key Takeaways for Engineering Leadership

Martyn leaves leaders with three key takeaways from his experience leading both startups and large engineering organizations:

• Align Incentives Continuously: Align incentives, ensuring people not only understand company goals but also how their work directly advances them. Recalibrate regularly as circumstances change.
• Make Trust the FoundationTrust is the foundation: leaders must extend it consistently, embody it themselves, and respond firmly if it is broken to preserve credibility.
• Prepare for the Future: Look beyond immediate demands by laying the groundwork two to three years ahead, giving teams a clear and motivating long-term horizon that connects today’s efforts to tomorrow’s growth.

In the end, these points highlight a simple but powerful truth: engineering leadership is less about code and systems than about creating the right environment for people to succeed. As Verhaegen put it, “It's very easy to be doing what's required now, but if you're in a growth company, you'll want to spend enough time on where you want to be two, three years from now”.

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