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# Trust at scale

Mike Fines warns that hiring to solve organizational friction only deepens underlying trust fractures. Discover how this DoorDash leader enforces definitive boundaries to build hyper-scaling engineering teams.

- **Speakers:** [Mike Fynes](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@mike-fynes)
- **Event:** World Congress 2026 Europe
- **Published:** July 9, 2026
- **Duration:** 26:41
- **URL:** https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100175-trust-at-scale

## Summary

Mike Fines, an engineering leader at DoorDash, explores why trust is the critical, often-overlooked factor in building hyper-scaling organizations. While the default reaction to organizational friction is to simply hire more people, doing so without first addressing underlying trust fractures only exacerbates the problem. Drawing inspiration from The Godfather phrasing "The gun will be there," Fines challenges developers and leaders to become unequivocally reliable within their teams. He models trust in three concentric layers—social, implicit, and explicit—explaining that as companies scale, the direct explicit trust of small teams inevitably deteriorates into organizational silos and a tribal "us versus them" mentality. Sharing a candid failure from his early career, Fines illustrates the delicate asymmetry of trust, noting it is "gained in drops, lost in buckets." After unintentionally breaking his team’s autonomy by overriding a technical decision, he had to purposefully step completely away from technical meetings and retrospectives. By shifting to a private devil's advocate role, he successfully placed ownership back in the hands of the developers, helping them evolve into the highest-performing team in the company. To bridge trust across teams in scaling environments, Fines advises prioritizing the immediate elimination of team dependencies, treating them as non-negotiable zero-priority issues. He also champions the power of giving a definitive "no" to protect a team's commitments, emphasizing that failing to deliver on a "maybe" is catastrophically damaging to inter-team reliability. Ultimately, building trust cannot be aggressively mapped, audited, or shortcut; invoking Ernest Hemingway, Fines reminds engineering leaders that the only way to really trust someone is to simply trust them.

**Keywords:** hyperscaling engineering organizations, trusting engineering teams, implicit vs explicit trust, team autonomy in engineering, organizational silos, tribalism in software teams, eliminating team dependencies, trust building asymmetry, engineering management methodologies, rebuilding broken team trust, managing technical decisions, engineering leadership strategies, inter-team reliability, developer team cohesion

## Chapters

1. **Defining the core concept of absolute team trust** (00:09) — A classic movie reference illustrates the ultimate organizational goal of establishing unquestioned interpersonal reliability.
1. **Managing scale across distributed engineering teams** (01:17) — Sustaining rapid organizational growth relies on establishing effective collaborative practices rather than continuously increasing headcount.
1. **The initial failure to build autonomous teams** (02:11) — The transition from individual contributor to management frequently exposes the pitfalls of eager over-involvement and unintentional micromanagement.
1. **Breaking team trust through top-down technical overrides** (03:36) — Overruling a team's thoroughly researched technical decision destroys their initiative and silences their input during planning meetings.
1. **Understanding the three concentric layers of trust** (05:24) — Human interaction is governed by an operating model consisting of broad societal norms, role-based implicit assumptions, and direct explicit relationships.
1. **Relying on explicit trust within small organizations** (07:59) — Early-stage companies function efficiently by depending entirely on direct interpersonal contacts and familiar processes.
1. **The societal responsibility and faith placed in engineers** (09:22) — Businesses and society place immense faith in software systems like cloud infrastructure and financial platforms to operate without interruption.
1. **How organizational growth degrades interpersonal team trust** (11:15) — Surpassing organizational thresholds weakens established engineering ceremonies and inadvertently isolates functional groups from one another.
1. **Avoiding the trap of tribalism and toxic silos** (13:07) — Encouraging a strongly inward-looking group identity fabricates short-term cohesion while ultimately damaging broader company alignment.
1. **Gaining trust in drops and losing it in buckets** (15:34) — Professional reputation relies on a delicate asymmetry where minor repetitive successes build confidence but singular failures cause instantaneous reputational damage.
1. **Rebuilding team autonomy by stepping out of technical decisions** (17:25) — Deliberately avoiding architectural discussions and acting privately as a devil's advocate forces developers to reclaim project ownership.
1. **Scaling inter-team trust to avoid invisible efficiency taxes** (21:25) — Unreliable dependencies between engineering functions manifest as padded delivery estimates, excessive oversight, and inefficient technical workarounds.
1. **Hiring for autonomy and building operational reliability** (23:30) — Achieving true organizational maturity requires hiring engineers capable of independent execution and solidifying operational stability prior to adding headcount.

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- [Expanding the trust landscape to additional stakeholders](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100076-beyond-authentication-an-open-source-trust-model-for-the-agentic-web) (from "Beyond authentication: an open-source trust model for the agentic web")
- [Scaling organizational trust across hybrid multi-repository workflows](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100106-craftsmanship-in-the-age-of-agents) (from "Craftsmanship in the Age of Agents")
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- [Three habits of high-trust hybrid developer teams](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100106-craftsmanship-in-the-age-of-agents) (from "Craftsmanship in the Age of Agents")
- [Diagnosing crises of trust in system performance](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/2103-systems-thinking-for-performance-how-to-diagnose-and-fix-slow-systems-without-guessing) (from "Systems Thinking for Performance: How to Diagnose and Fix Slow Systems without Guessing")

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