It's all politics. Top level leadership is triangulating between keeping investors happy and the business running. Product Area leads saying "we need to keep he

It's all politics. Top level leadership is triangulating between keeping investors happy and the business running. Product Area leads saying "we need to keep headcount to fend of competitor X" or "to stop customer Y from losing trust and abandoning us" (although that last one clearly doesn't work at Google). The actual headcount number a team has at is the integral of a hundred political decisions, not any kind analysis of what headcount actually makes sense.