Does it? Not necessarily. At my previous employer I was one of several team leads and we almost always broke into 4-8 man teams. One of my biggest takeaways fr

Does it? Not necessarily. At my previous employer I was one of several team leads and we almost always broke into 4-8 man teams. One of my biggest takeaways from doing that for a couple years is how dramatically productivity can swing based on factors like the texture of the project, the clarity of the goal, the freedom of the TL to make judgment calls without needing to get approval from a BA, morale, the quality of the spec (note that quality != length), etc. No reason a small dedicated team cannot build large products with reasonable deadlines and a balanced lifestyle. Though, in the interest of full disclosure, in my opinion 50 hours a week is fully balanced and a team can run at 50 hours pretty consistently without ill effects if they WANT to and are HAPPY with their mission and job.