Why small teams ship more than big ones
Adding people to a late project makes it later. The math behind why we keep our teams deliberately small, and how it changes what we can build.
Every additional person on a team adds a communication link, and the number of links grows faster than the number of people. Five people have ten connections; ten people have forty-five. The coordination cost is quietly quadratic.
This is why small teams so often out-ship large ones. They spend less time synchronizing and more time building. Decisions get made in a conversation instead of a meeting series.
The catch is that a small team has to be a senior team. There's no room for hand-offs or ramp-up; everyone contributes from day one. That's a hiring problem, not a process problem, and it's the one worth solving.
We cap most teams at four to six people for exactly this reason. It's not a constraint we tolerate. It's a choice we defend.