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It's no secret that small teams of experts do not need managers. But if the team grows, you will either have to sacrifice producer productivity to coordination

It's no secret that small teams of experts do not need managers. But if the team grows, you will either have to sacrifice producer productivity to coordination and management tasks or hire someone to offload those responsibilities. Many orgs struggle as they undergo a "phase change" from one type of team to another, as it requires a different set of skills, strategies and expectations along with dramatically higher staffing requirements. There is probably a way to compartmentalize some larger projects so you are an aggregation of smaller teams but I personally haven't seen it so I can't comment on it.

smcleod 3y ago
I’d argue your team really shouldn’t grow too big if you want to remain effective. 4-8 people seems to be the sweet spot in my experience.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  The truly difficult bit is making an organization with 100 or 1000 different 4-8 people teams to build something more complex. There is a vast array of problems that need solving that just can't be tackled by one 4-8 person team.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    It turns out that nothing in life can be tackled by one 4-8 person team. We are all heavily dependent on each other to build the complex things we have. Our solution to make that work at the macroeconomic scale is to employ a service model. The solution to which you speak is microservices. No, not some misguided multi-process IPC technology model that seems to have tried to usurp the name, I mean real microservices. The people model. Where each 4-8 person team continues to act if they are an independent businesses, even if they legally work for a single organization. It's not particularly difficult. The macro economy, which operates at an unfathomably larger scale, shows how easy it is. But, indeed, it can be uncomfortable for some people to not feel like they have full control over an organization.
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      The macro economy is dominated by gigantic conglomerates that try to own and integrate a significant amount of their entire supply chains - think General Electric, Mitsubishi, Samsung. Small to Medium Enterprises have a few niches where they work (restaurants and other service industries being the largest by far), but they play a relatively small role and are not normally part of any supply chain, they only really work at the very end of the chain. Similarly, building a whole product out of pure microservices with teams that barely coordinate with each other beyond maintaining their APIs doesn't really work. There is very much a place for such microservices for certain well understood problems (authentication being probably the clearest), but for most domain specific work you need far more coordination than that to truly evolve a complex product. For example, you can't build a computer game in this model. A modern 3D engine requires far more than 4-8 people, and there is no clean separation between pieces to afford this. And even if there were, there is no One True Way to build one: the teams designing the 3D engine need to communicate with the teams building the game engine and the game designers themselves and the artists to achieve a cohesive whole. A 100-person project just can't (always) be modeled as 15 4-8-person projects.
      - randomdata 3y ago
        > the teams designing the 3D engine need to communicate with the teams building the game engine and the game designers themselves and the artists to achieve a cohesive whole. Sure, just as they need to communicate to the farmer what food needs to be grown in order to ensure that the right food shows up on their dinner table. These are solved problems, though. We already know how to do incredibly complex things at scale.
        tsimionescu 3y ago
        No, it is nowhere near like that. Food is a particularly bad example, as the food industry is extremely wasteful overall, with a huge percentage of all food produced being thrown away at all levels of the production chain all the way to the final consumer. In addition, most companies that package food in various ways, including major restaurants, either own or contract farming business for specific quantities of specific crops ahead of time, spending large amounts of time to negotiate contracts to this effect, and sometimes working even closer when a particular result is required. If you find yourself craving Mongolian food one night, you may often simply find that none is available, at any price you are willing to pay, unless you worked with someone to make some months in advance. And conversely if you open a Mongolian restaurant, you may just not find any customers for it and waste significant money on it. (substitute Mongolian with any other food that is not commonly eaten or even thought about in your area)
- RevEng 3y ago
  For a single team, sure, but the entire company isn't just one team of 4-8 people. When you start getting multiple teams, and some of them take on common tasks for the rest (finance, recruiting, PR, etc), you need something to tie them all together. It doesn't have to be a manager per se, but a free for all doesn't work either.

smcleod 3y ago

I’d argue your team really shouldn’t grow too big if you want to remain effective. 4-8 people seems to be the sweet spot in my experience.

tsimionescu 3y ago
The truly difficult bit is making an organization with 100 or 1000 different 4-8 people teams to build something more complex. There is a vast array of problems that need solving that just can't be tackled by one 4-8 person team.
- randomdata 3y ago
  It turns out that nothing in life can be tackled by one 4-8 person team. We are all heavily dependent on each other to build the complex things we have. Our solution to make that work at the macroeconomic scale is to employ a service model. The solution to which you speak is microservices. No, not some misguided multi-process IPC technology model that seems to have tried to usurp the name, I mean real microservices. The people model. Where each 4-8 person team continues to act if they are an independent businesses, even if they legally work for a single organization. It's not particularly difficult. The macro economy, which operates at an unfathomably larger scale, shows how easy it is. But, indeed, it can be uncomfortable for some people to not feel like they have full control over an organization.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    The macro economy is dominated by gigantic conglomerates that try to own and integrate a significant amount of their entire supply chains - think General Electric, Mitsubishi, Samsung. Small to Medium Enterprises have a few niches where they work (restaurants and other service industries being the largest by far), but they play a relatively small role and are not normally part of any supply chain, they only really work at the very end of the chain. Similarly, building a whole product out of pure microservices with teams that barely coordinate with each other beyond maintaining their APIs doesn't really work. There is very much a place for such microservices for certain well understood problems (authentication being probably the clearest), but for most domain specific work you need far more coordination than that to truly evolve a complex product. For example, you can't build a computer game in this model. A modern 3D engine requires far more than 4-8 people, and there is no clean separation between pieces to afford this. And even if there were, there is no One True Way to build one: the teams designing the 3D engine need to communicate with the teams building the game engine and the game designers themselves and the artists to achieve a cohesive whole. A 100-person project just can't (always) be modeled as 15 4-8-person projects.
    - randomdata 3y ago
      > the teams designing the 3D engine need to communicate with the teams building the game engine and the game designers themselves and the artists to achieve a cohesive whole. Sure, just as they need to communicate to the farmer what food needs to be grown in order to ensure that the right food shows up on their dinner table. These are solved problems, though. We already know how to do incredibly complex things at scale.
      - tsimionescu 3y ago
        No, it is nowhere near like that. Food is a particularly bad example, as the food industry is extremely wasteful overall, with a huge percentage of all food produced being thrown away at all levels of the production chain all the way to the final consumer. In addition, most companies that package food in various ways, including major restaurants, either own or contract farming business for specific quantities of specific crops ahead of time, spending large amounts of time to negotiate contracts to this effect, and sometimes working even closer when a particular result is required. If you find yourself craving Mongolian food one night, you may often simply find that none is available, at any price you are willing to pay, unless you worked with someone to make some months in advance. And conversely if you open a Mongolian restaurant, you may just not find any customers for it and waste significant money on it. (substitute Mongolian with any other food that is not commonly eaten or even thought about in your area)
RevEng 3y ago
For a single team, sure, but the entire company isn't just one team of 4-8 people. When you start getting multiple teams, and some of them take on common tasks for the rest (finance, recruiting, PR, etc), you need something to tie them all together. It doesn't have to be a manager per se, but a free for all doesn't work either.