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Constraints work
Organizations often default to expanding the size of the team as complexity increases. The impulse is natural: More work seems to demand more hands. But this instinct, while understandable, contradicts a fundamental truth about human collaboration: that beyond a certain threshold, adding more people to a team decreases rather than increases its effectiveness.
Lean Teams embraces the counterintuitive wisdom that smaller teams, typically no more than 8–10 people, are more effective than larger ones. This pattern draws inspiration from various sources, including Amazon’s “Two-Pizza Teams” (teams small enough to be fed by two pizzas) and countless studies showing that communication overhead grows exponentially with team size. (You don’t even need to look at a study to understand this. You just need to be able to count. In a team of five, there are 10 possible one-on-one connections. If the team doubles its size to 10, this jumps to 45 connections.)
Large teams will also struggle to apply other patterns in this book. elections (15), upward representation (24), and team incentives (25) are more challenging with more people to consider. structural and psychological safety (3) and dissolvability (9) are harder to come by and pull off. It’s harder to do the right thing (26) because there are too many definitions of “right.”