The case against bigger teams

When a project is behind, the default move is to add people. It feels like progress: headcount is legible, easy to defend in a board deck, and tangible in a way that "we changed how we sequence work" is not.

But every additional person on a project adds coordination cost. Past about six engineers, you stop being a team and start being a small organization, with all the meetings, alignment overhead, and hand-offs that implies.

The teams we see ship the most are surprisingly small — usually four to six people who have worked together long enough to skip most of the ceremony. They're not heroically productive; they just aren't paying the tax.

If a project is behind, the better questions are usually: what are we doing that we shouldn't be? What did we underestimate? What does the critical path actually look like? Hiring is the answer maybe one time in five.