At a certain point, you need to make sure everything is redundant. Have two people understand and one component well enough to step in during an emergency (e.g.

At a certain point, you need to make sure everything is redundant. Have two people understand and one component well enough to step in during an emergency (e.g. something breaks whole someone is on vacation). You can still separate tasks based on who is best at something, but make sure every component has been worked on by multiple people. A company I worked for had a serious problem with that, so I pushed to get every piece covered by two people. I used "code reviews" for this, where in other to submit a change, someone else familiar with the component had to review it, and they had to understand what the code did and how it did it. We only had a handful of employees, and it was definitely a pain getting it set up, but we were able to survive our first "key man" leaving, followed by a second "key man" somewhat soon after. If there is anyone on a project that isn't replaceable, you better be okay with the project failing if that person leaves for whatever reason.