I remember the exact moment I realized we were in trouble. Twenty-two engineers, three product teams, shipping like crazy—but our PR review time had crept from 4 hours to 3 days. Sprint planning consumed entire mornings. Senior engineers spent 80% of their time in meetings. We'd just closed our Series A, hired aggressively to capture market share, and somehow gotten slower. The counterintuitive truth about scaling engineering teams: adding more people often slows you down first. The coordination overhead explodes faster than the productivity gains materialize. Communication paths grow exponentially—10 people have 45 potential communication paths, 50 people have 1,225. This isn't a people problem. It's a coordination problem masquerading as a velocity problem. Why Scaling from 10 to 50 Engineers Is the Hardest Transition Most CTOs can navigate 0 to 10 engineers by instinct. It's scrappy, direct, everyone knows what everyone else is working on. The 10 to 50 transition is different.…