Small Teams, Big Results: Why More People doesn't Always Mean More Capacity

More Hands, More Coordination

Whenever a difficult task must be carried out, the usual tendency is to bring in more people. If a project becomes important, we increase the number of people working on it. As a deadline draws near, we involve even more people in the discussion. When a problem spans several departments, we invite another group to the meeting. There is a sound reasoning for this: having more people can bring with it greater expertise, more experience, and greater capacity. On the other hand, there is a cost that leaders do not always take into consideration, each additional person means one more relationship to deal with, one more point of view to resolve, and one more channel of communication to maintain. At times the more pertinent question is not who else we should add, but whether the right people are already in the room.

The Rule of 100

When Steve Jobs was forming the Macintosh team at Apple he came up with a strict rule: the Mac team must never have more than 100 people. If anyone wished to join the team, another person had to leave first. The reason for this rule was almost personal since Jobs stated that he could not recall more than one hundred first names and that he only wanted to work with people whom he actually knew. In Jobs' view, going over that number would mean that the team would have to adopt a different kind of structure, one which would prevent him from remaining closely involved with the work. He also expressed this idea elsewhere, holding that a small number of truly excellent individuals, working closely together, could beat out a much larger number of average people. Although Apple itself later grew to become one of the largest companies in the world, the team responsible for creating the product which made the company famous remained intentional and deliberately small.

The Arithmetic of Coordination

There are practical reasons why a small team can beat a larger one. Communication is more straightforward. Each member clearly knows what is assigned to them, which means that accountability isn't lost in a large group. Decisions require fewer layers of coordination. Consider the arithmetic. A team of five people has ten possible one-to-one relationships. Grow that team to ten people, and there are 45. Get to twenty, and there are 190. Not every one of those relationships needs constant attention, but the math points to something real: headcount grows in a straight line, while the complexity of managing everyone's relationships grows much faster.

Small Isn't Automatic

This doesn't mean that small is always better. A team which has the wrong kind of expertise, no authority, or is not capable doesn't become effective merely because it is small. None of this means small is automatically better. Some problems, especially in government, genuinely need multiple agencies, disciplines, and stakeholders, because no single group has everything necessary to solve them. The goal isn't smallness for its own sake. It's intentional design: knowing who actually needs to be part of the work, who has information nobody else can reasonably supply, who has the authority to decide, and who is accountable for the outcome. Some people only need to be in the room for one conversation and don't need a permanent seat at the table. Getting that distinction right lets an organization draw on a wide range of expertise without pulling every contributor into every conversation.

The Discipline of Fewer Seats

The actual benefit of having a small team might not lie in its small number at all; rather, it is the discipline that being small imposes on everybody. When there are fewer places at the table, leaders have to carefully consider who takes one of those places, what each individual contributes, and what the group really exists for. This kind of discipline is most important within large organizations, where a certain amount of complexity is inevitable, even though a great deal of it isn't. A company that had grown immensely around it had managed to build something truly remarkable with a team that had deliberately kept itself small. The takeaway for the rest of us is smaller than Job’s particular story, but applicable in all situations: having more people in the room does not mean that there is greater capacity to get a task done. At times the most effective team is simply the right people carrying out clear work for a purpose that everyone actually understands.

References

Jobs, S. (1995). Steve Jobs oral history interview. Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History / Computerworld Honors Program.

Steve Jobs Archive. (2023). Make something wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words.

Sculley, J. (2015, July 28). Why the Mac team could have no more than 100 people. Cult of Mac.

Podolny, J. M., & Hansen, M. T. (2020). How Apple is organized for innovation. Harvard Business Review, 98(6), 86–95.

Small Teams, Big Results: Why More People doesn't Always Mean More Capacity

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