> Small teams leverage speed as a competitive advantage which is key to winning over competitors. Other benefits include better communication, more engagement,

> Small teams leverage speed as a competitive advantage which is key to winning over competitors. Other benefits include better communication, more engagement, more profits to reinvest, and, overall, better productivity. Small groups avoid the Ringelmann effect, which is the tendency for individuals to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases. More importantly, the headcount constraint drives creativity and innovative solutions. > Controlling headcount expansion when experiencing fast growth is challenging. Targeting an efficient number of teammates is tricky because it's difficult to know and test when fewer people can achieve more. This is really challenging, but one thing to keep in mind when planning headcount is that product usage and business revenue can scale very, very quickly once you find product-market fit, but there’s a slow maximum rate you can find, hire, and onboard more (good) people; especially good managers. At Notion we were too cautious about adding engineers because we over-valued the efficiency of the small team, and under-estimated the difficulty/low rate of growing the team. This caught us by surprise - we thought we had a good trajectory figured out compared with our business growth, but at a certain point the growth ate through the headroom in our systems, and we spent most of a year on reliability instead of features. We fixed the problems, and have been hiring aggressively since that whiplash, but it still feels like we lost a lot of time chasing efficiency instead of starting hyper growth hiring. That said, hindsight is 20/20. If you start aggressive hiring as soon as you see some market fit, and then growth tapers off, you can burn both your efficiency and runway on a “false start”. But even if you’re right to start, you’re going to hit the “good problems” of hyper growth next. Maybe it’s part of the hyper growth territory to feel a year behind hiring until suddenly you double the team in a year from 300 to 600 engineers like we did at Airbnb and then all the culture falls apart and suddenly you’re in the Warring States period.