The more members you add to a team the harder communication becomes. To that end, it's sometimes hard for me to understand why startups are so focused on growing their teams out during the early stages.
For all the talk about how good communication is key for a team's success, I have a counter idea: Avoid having to communicate in the first place. Communication is not the ideal to a team's success; less team members to communicate with is.
The closer a team size moves to one, the more efficient its productivity.
Jeff Bezos likes to refer to the ideal team size as "two-pizza teams:" any team that is small enough that they can be fed by a couple of pizza pies, is a model of efficiency and accomplishment. Anything larger is not.
Image courtesy of Randy son of Robert
The medium is the mess
Communication is actually bad. It inherently involves a loss of information. The more communication that is needed, the less of the product plan will be efficiently implemented according to the original vision.
Consider the impossibility of trying to tell a friend about a wierd dream you had the previous night. Can you convey every single detail of the dream before it fades? Of course not. You have constraints (like time and memory), so you cut out anything which is "insignificant."
The same holds true for any project plan. The larger the amount of people to convey information to, the less efficient you can be at it. Explaining to one person every detail of the plan is tedious enough. Imagine having to do the same for multiple people. Daisy chaining the information so that it is passed on from executives to managers to smaller groups has its own problems: Information loss and corruption at multiple points. It's the age-old game of "operator," only with results that are not nearly so funny.
When there is one person both running and operating the entire show, you have 0% communication efficiency loss. The vision is designed and implemented exactly as it was originally conceived. Add a second teammate and you automatically introduce inefficiency into the equation. With each new person added to a team, the potential for communication efficiency loss gets worse as each person creates failure points with every other person. Once you start getting beyond 8 team members, the efficiency loss becomes so great that it can only be made up by throwing additional resources at the problem. In other words, you are not going to see double the output from a team of 15 people as you will with a team of 8 (even though you'd expect it on paper). In fact, you'd be lucky to see even a 25% increase in output, even though your team size has doubled.
Keeping your team small
So what's the overarching lesson? You don't need a huge team to successfully launch a start up. In fact, your chances of succeeding are better, the smaller your team size. You cut out as many communication points of failure as possible and keep your startup costs down.
So how do you keep your team small?
* Choose a project that is simple to implement. Don't try to create a complex suite of applications. (Yeah, I'm a hypocrite). Focus on solving a single problem. Philip Kaplan made email more efficient to use by stalling it instead of managing it. Dead simple approach and a great idea.Take the easier approach when possible.
* Choose people that can wear multiple hats. Can your designer code? Can your programmer manage a community? Can your marketing guru fund raise? Can one guy do it all?
Image courtesy of Mike Burns
* Document everything. It's obvious that you will need a business plan. What's not so obvious is that you should also document the seemingly mundane; methods used for team communication, methods used for integrating with potential partners, methods used for keeping a company blog up-to-date and interesting. All documentation should be available via a central location. A wiki can work really well for this purpose. Good documentation lessens the loss from communication failures.
* Arrange your workspace in common areas. Segregating your team in different offices is a recipe for lost communication data and with it, a need for additional people. You'd be surprised at how many roles can be shared by multiple people, so long as they have the ability to communicate instantly and unimpeded with each other. Put people between walls, and those shared tasks will need to be managed by additional team members.
Examples
The following are examples of two-pizza teams that generated some of the most popular community content sites online:
* Fark
* Worth1000
* Newgrounds
* SomethingAwful
* Delicious
* Metafilter
* Etsy
* Reddit
* Flickr
Know any others?
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Posted by Ross Kimbarovsky on 2008-08-18 19:20:59
Hey Avi, I certainly agree that small teams can be truly powerful. But I do challenge your statement and following discussion that "communication is actually bad". Communication need not involve loss of information. Poor communication and bad communication practices inherently involve loss of information. And I'm not sure that a departure from the original vision is a de facto bad result (I wonder, for example, whether worth1000 today looks just like you envisioned it years ago). Often, the original vision evolves - as it must in most cases. Today, crowdSPRING isn't 100% what we envisioned it would be when we first started talking about it in 2006 (there were just two of us then). Today, it's much, much better. And it's better largely because of our small team (8 people) and specifically as a result of the excellent communication among members of our team. We can look at lots of examples - Google, Apple, Adobe - they all started with an original vision that's quite different from who those companies are today. So - while I generally agree that small teams are great and that you begin to lose efficiencies as you grow in size, I'd encourage your readers to focus on the quality of their communications with others, rather than solely the quantity of team members. There's no question that poor communication practices can lead to huge failures. But the failure to communicate can lead to even larger failures. And I think most of your readers will agree - one person can't do it all. Other than these few comments - really nice post and great advice! Best, Ross Kimbarovsky co-Founder http://www.crowdspring.com
Posted by m_eiman on 2008-08-20 07:25:18
A quick google will show you that you can feed several Facebooks with two pizzas - as long as it's the right pizzas: http://www.iafalls.com/pizzainfo.html
Posted by Harlley on 2008-08-20 11:00:13
Rememberthemilk for instance http://www.rememberthemilk.com/about/
Posted by Blaze on 2008-08-20 18:23:08
Very informative, and quite useful. There's some businesses that should read this article. You guys are always so wise. :D
Posted by Tom on 2008-08-22 16:01:20
Nice post, something I would expect to see on a big tech blog :) Thanks for the insight.
Posted by Calvin on 2008-08-22 16:57:30
Nice post! I totally agree with you. GameStrata has only three engineers and we have been adding new features to the site every week. Working in a small team is definitely much more efficient.
Posted by jen on 2008-11-22 12:20:13
excellent post! i think people overvalue the whole "power in numbers" idea. i know from experience that we always get better work accomplished at my company in smaller groups... now if only we could get all of the clients to agree!
Posted by ????? on 2008-12-17 13:01:23
Thank you for the good information and the positive atitude.
Posted by Arthur Blake on 2009-03-14 00:36:53
I think a lot of it has to do with having the *right* team members too. I've been working on a start up idea for two years (on and off) on my own and I never seem to get enough time to really work on it enough to get it off the ground (of course it's really hard when you're bootstrapping too). I believe that more people can get more things done, but only if they complement each other in the right way. I've worked on a team of two people where the two of us got more done together than we ever could have done if our work was aggregated separately (that is, the sum of the whole was much more than the sum of the parts.) But, that was a rare case, I admit. Switching to music for a second, If I think of great bands, they usually have 3-4 core members (maybe 1 or 2 visionaries) but how many really great bands do you know of that have only 1 team member? So maybe the sweet spot is not having too small a team or too large a team-- but rather a team of just the right size... and composition of course, which is what it looks like you have there!
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Posted by Alicia Feliz on 2008-08-18 17:41:03
I think Facebook was a two-person idea and there's no doubt that it has become very popular in recent times. Even now I don't believe their work force is exceptionally large. With the internet and so much technology at the hands of the average person, there really isn't a need for a large number of employees anymore.