1. Product management

2. Project management

3. Marketing

4. Database/datawarehouse

5. Business development

5. R&D (includes software engineers)

6. Finance & Accounting

7. QA.

Any insights as to employee ratios in those departments would be greatly appreciated. As well as if there are any informative web sites that may give insight into employees ratios for this type of company.

Thank you

First, your project manager would act as QA because he’s the one who should know best what the features are supposed to be, even if the specs are not perfectly documented. And as a bonus, he’s the one the developers will obey, so he has a chance to set the required level of quality.

In my experience, although I consider this to be bad a thing, the project manager is generally the best tester. He knows he will be facing the client/boss/investor with a demo or a delivery and he will take the heat if something does go wrong. So he will really seek out the non-obvious but catastrophic bugs.

Additionally, the leader is the one who does all the work for which he does not have a skilled subordinate. Which means he does it all until he has a good QA, tester, etc.

So my advice is to have a very solid and motivated project manager. Giving him shares or stocks of the company is not a bad idea. Making him the same person as the lead developer is a bad idea because he cant’ judge right (as a QA should) if he’s part of the team that builds it. Incidentally, if your tech team is really small, the boss might be the best project manager around. It can become painful pretty fast, because the boss has so many other things he should be doing, but that’s how start-ups start very often.

Finally, I recommend not waiting before setting-up tools and methods even for a small team. Don’t let everyone improvise the way they document the specs, tests and plan the development roadmap, or you will have no idea of what will be done when, and bad surprises all the way. At zSlide we use a lot of XPlanner (http://www.xplanner.org/) for that. It’s a Java web app which is a litlle painful to install and does not have a great UI, but it has exactly the right structure and it’s based on eXtreme programming, so agile development works very well with it.

Louis.

Roughly speaking you should have 1 QA engineer for 3 developers, 1 operation engineer for 4 developers and apply the 2 pizza rule for manager (i.e 1 manager for 8 people max). And 1 architect if you have more then 2 dev teams.

My recommendation is to start small and to adjust gradually. This helps setting up a core team with a strong culture and clear principles and to focus on process and organisation baring in mind the capacity planning factor.

It is much better to accomodate new staff when process /organisation is clear then improvising and changing the latter on the fly as the team gets bigger.