Product/Engineering headcount planning
Our headcount planning philosophy balances three things:
- Our need to have a stable financial plan for the fiscal year
- Our desire to be flexible so we can respond to changing business needs as the fiscal year progresses
- The lead time we need to make a great hire for a specific role
philosophy
This section documents how we are approaching headcount in . This may change for .
We have committed to overall headcount numbers for the fiscal year with the assumption that we want to avoid making additional headcount requests throughout the fiscal year. To arrive at these overall numbers, we built a model that estimated growth per team. With the overall headcount numbers approved, we are treating future headcount as shared pool across engineering. The model we built is not a commitment to fund any particular team. Instead, headcount is confirmed to specific teams on a quarter by quarter basis.
The source of truth for comitted current and future product and engineering headcount is the open roles tab of this spreadsheet. Headcount with the Placeholder prefix is not guaranteed to any particular team.
How do I get headcount as an engineering hiring manager?
If you want to request engineering headcount for a future quarter, please add your request to this document.
To give our talent team enough lead time, and so that we can holistically evaluate needs across the entire engineering organization given a finite amount of headcount to allocate each quarter, headcount requests for a specific quarter need to be logged 15 weeks in advance of the start of that quarter.
Customer support
While Customer Support adheres to these principles, headcount planning happens separate from this process given the dependency on our overall sales performance to necessitate most additional headcount.