I've noticed that, as projects or entire companies grow, the effort spent on the product decreases relative to the effort spent on things _about_ the product.

I've noticed that, as projects or entire companies grow, the effort spent on the product decreases relative to the effort spent on things _about_ the product. Effort spent on building specialized libraries, tooling, secondary infrastructure as well as meetings, coordinating with stakeholders, dealing with outside research firms, etc. explodes while effort spent building those things that are clearly on chain delivering value to the customer grows rather more slowly. It's really hard to decide if this is a good or bad thing. Certainly huge amounts of it can be seen as non-value-adding wankery, but it may all be in some way intrinsically necessary in order to scale up.