Less is MORE

Often I have come across strategies in software industries where in order to make delivery faster, the team is made bigger. Though it may work in some cases, it may not really benefit long term.

Bigger teams can have its own challenges -

• It is a human limitation that one person can manage max 6-7 team members directly. Anything more than that means spending more time in getting to make the team work together. Effectively, we may end up with multiple team members who are spending their time tracking the project status, people management, distributing work and so on.
• Every individual in a team has his/her own different personalities. Gelling together all personalities and making them work together can be challenging.
• Team work requires getting to know and complement each other. Team building can be challenging in bigger teams.
• Being able to divide tasks in such a way so everyone is kept busy as well as there are minimum dependencies among each other.
• It is super difficult for each team member to holistically know what is being delivered. It involves considerable time investment in being up to date.

With smaller teams, we can get rid of all the above challenges. Lesser the team members, more easy it is to work together. Team members do not struggle to get visibility of their work. It is easy to identify the performers vs non performers and ensure work is distributed. It results in every individual have good sense of ownership and is able to contribute effectively. Throwing the ball and blame game is avoided. Inherently team politics stays away and the focus is on performing and delivering.

One of my most recent wins with small teams has been building a product in just 30 person days. This is the fastest I have built a product in my entire tenure that also involved understanding the domain and designing the UI! The product still has a long way to go, but getting it to a point of demo in this span is nothing short of an achievement. This achievement is with just 2 full time team members (including me) and 2 consultants working 8 hours a week. At the end of it I was myself surprised that we did it...

Less is More is definitely the mantra for software development.