I'm am trying to figure out how to manage IT and users laptops at a small startup without having the engineering team take care of it. What solutions have you guys used?
You can get a decent service in the UK for around £60 per month per head. This would cover everything OS including upgrades, antivir etc, remote monitoring and support, business hours telephone support, everything to do with M365 or Google Workspace including managing the vendor relationship. You would still probably want to manage your own infra assuming you’re cloud based and you still have a raft of SaaS auth to manage, you still need to guide others on tooling, manage tooling integrations, licenses, relationships. There will be a time when you’re too small for £60 a month but you’ll soon know when there’s to much IT to do! One other option is to recruit an internal IT person part or full time.
I mean, you may wish to get an MSP providing your IT service if you don't want to have staff run it. But there's a handful of tools that are way cheaper than traditional enterprise IT which may be workable for a small environment. Pulseway is pretty all-inclusive, PDQ sells pretty much the best software deployment solution for Windows boxes, SolarWinds sells a variety of cheap IT management products that work well (recent drama notwithstanding... most of their lower tier products were completely unaffected).