It may also depend on the kind of thing that's being shipped. Want to ship something large and monolithic? Want it quick? You need a big team. If your product

It may also depend on the kind of thing that's being shipped. Want to ship something large and monolithic? Want it quick? You need a big team. If your product can be modularized into small problems/features/projects that are one- or two-pizza sized, and the abstraction overhead to connect pieces together is low enough, then yeah, small teams make more sense. I suppose the real question is whether the cost of splitting big problems into small ones is worth the productivity bonus of working on those small problems.