Column
Working as a team
A team exists to do what one person cannot. As it grows, that can stop being true in several places, in coordination, ownership, knowledge and decisions. This column reads through them in that order, along with what keeps a team working.
It usually starts when the work falls behind and someone asks for more people.
Brooks' Law
Adding people to a late project tends to make it later, because ramp-up and coordination cost more than they add.Keep in mind: When a project is late, cut scope or move the date before adding peopleBrooks' Law is about a project that is already late. A related cost can keep running when nothing is late and the team simply keeps hiring.
Dunbar's Number
People keep only about 150 stable relationships. Engineers extrapolate: past shared context, added headcount goes to coordination.Keep in mind: When people lose track of each other's work, it is time to splitCoordination is the cost everyone can see. The quieter cost is in how much each person puts in once the group is large.
Ringelmann Effect
Each person contributes less as a group grows, most of all when no one can see who did what.Keep in mind: Make each contribution visible and ownedThat is about work everyone is already doing. Work nobody has started yet, like a page sent to a group channel, tends to run into the same problem.
Bystander Effect
The more people who see a problem, the less likely any one of them is to act on it.Keep in mind: If everyone owns it, no one does, so name one personThe usual fix is to split the team and give each part an owner. How it is split does not stay on the org chart.
Conway's Law
Systems end up shaped like the communication paths of the teams that build them.Keep in mind: To change the architecture, change the teams firstNaming one owner is the fix the last few laws point to. It has a price, because what keeps that part running collects with its owner.
Bus Factor
The fewer people who can keep a system running, the more its future depends on each of them staying.Keep in mind: Anything only one person can do is a risk to fix nowThe usual remedy is a handover document, and the person who has to write it is often the one least able to see what a newcomer lacks.
Curse of Knowledge
Once you know something, you can't easily imagine what it's like not to know it.Keep in mind: You cannot see your own assumptions, so watch a newcomer tryWhen decisions get made without that knowledge, a common response in a growing team is one more rule or approval step.
Context, Not Control
As an organization grows, rules and approvals tend to scale worse than shared understanding; Netflix's argument is that people given the reasons behind a goal make better local decisions than people given a procedure.Keep in mind: Fix the missing context before you write a ruleSome decisions still go to a meeting, and uneven knowledge shows up there too.
Law of Triviality
Discussion goes to the parts everyone understands, not the parts that matter.Keep in mind: Spend the discussion where the risk is, not where the opinions areOne way to bring the discussion back to what matters is to change what the team reads when the meeting starts.
Narratives, Not Slides
An argument cut down to slides and bullets loses the links between its points, so the gaps and warnings that prose would have exposed pass through the review unnoticed.Keep in mind: For decisions that matter, write prose, not bulletsEven a well-argued proposal leaves someone unconvinced, and the team still has to act as one.
Disagree and Commit
Waiting for everyone to agree is often slower than committing and correcting course if the call turns out wrong.Keep in mind: Disagree once and fully, then commit, unless it cannot be undone
