team size
How many people a thing needs, and what the extra ones cost: headcount, coordination, and the small-team claim.
FilterEveryone, all time70 from 49 people
- GO
Gergely Orosz quoted
Writes The Pragmatic Engineer
Our readingAI is making everyone build much faster
Their wordsAI is making everyone (small teams or big) build much faster…
- 3 days earlier
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Gergely Orosz quoted
Their wordsTheir business model is to run products with very very small teams vs before.
- 13 days earlier
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Co-founder and CEO of Decimals
Their wordsA lot of the roles that used to be two to three different people, people are going for one. Whether that's right or whether that's wrong, it's happening, right?
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 3rd of 19 in this recording
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Danny Martinez quoted
Their wordsa theme that I feel pretty confident standing behind is that the fact that one person has way more leverage than ever before does mean that a team can say, "Right, we're going to hire less people, but the people that we hire, we're going to give them better salaries.
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 18th of 19 in this recording
- 2 days earlier
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Molly Graham quoted
Co-founder of Glue Club and The Guild
Their wordsthey are about badly run companies slapping an AI label and getting some share points from that versus saying, "Whoops, we made we hired too many people."
↗Molly Graham: The grief, burnout, and opportunity hiding inside the AI transitionyoutube.com 6th of 20 in this recording
- 4 days earlier
- GT
Geoff Teehan quoted
Chief Design Officer at Lightspark
Their wordsI don't think I need more than what I have today, which is myself and four designers. I really don't. I think that the level of horsepower that we have, not just because of the people, but because of the tools and the people and our culture and our product, I feel like that is ample.
↗Geoff Teehan - Navigating change as a designeryoutube.com 8th of 15 in this recording
- 3 days earlier
- PS
Peter Sellis quoted
Former head of product at Discord
Our readingCollaboration carries coordination costs that leave a team moving as slow as its slowest node.
Their wordscollaboration comes with incredible coordination costs. And coordination costs essentially assure that you're moving as slow as the slowest node
↗90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord’s product chief | Peter Sellisyoutube.com 1st of 18 in this recording
- 1 day earlier
- GO
Gergely Orosz quoted
Their wordsTheir business depends on co’s not having enough in-house dev capacity, and thus “renting” devs from them.
- GO
Gergely Orosz quoted
Our readingWith AI tools, in-house development teams can do more and need less rented developer capacity.
Their wordsBut with AI tools, in-house dev teams can do more, and need less “renting”
- 4 days earlier
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Nev Flynn quoted
Head of Design at ElevenLabs
Their wordsI think as a small team, we definitely don't want to be the people that stand in the way of progress there, but rather find ways to support them
↗Nev Flynn - Bringing artful expression into enterprise designyoutube.com 5th of 20 in this recording
- 5 days earlier
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Dan Shipper quoted
Co-founder and chief executive of Every
Their wordsWhat is amazing about AI is it allows you to have a labs team of one.
↗How to run your product team like a research lab | Dan Shipper (Every) (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026)youtube.com 4th of 11 in this recording
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Dan Shipper quoted
Their wordsI think in the AI age, I I call it a two-slice team. Like you want one or two people max.
↗How to run your product team like a research lab | Dan Shipper (Every) (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026)youtube.com 6th of 11 in this recording
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Elena Verna quoted
Leads growth at Lovable; previously led growth at Miro
Their wordsSo, I think the AI's most interesting effect on organization is not replacing job, no matter how sensational those headlines are and how many impressions um they drive for people who just want to make waves. I think it's separating impact from head count.
↗The rise of HI-ICs | Elena Verna (Lovable) (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026)youtube.com 12th of 13 in this recording
- 2 days earlier
- RU
Roman Ugarte quoted
Leads product for Grok Bot at SpaceX AI
Their wordsif you define a startup by number of people or by like the funding round like none of those things really make any sense. The core thing that defines a startup is exactly what you're describing, which is this kind of scramble energy of things are kind of chaotic and kind of disorganized.
↗How we built Grok Bot in a month | Roman Ugarte (SpaceXAI)youtube.com 15th of 18 in this recording
- 4 days earlier
- NF
Nat Friedman quoted
Investor and engineer; CEO of GitHub from 2018 to 2021
Our readingSmaller teams are better
Their wordsSmaller teams are better Faster decisions, fewer meetings, more fun No need to chop up work for political reasons
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Nat Friedman quoted
Their wordsLarge-scale engineering projects are more soluble in IQ than they appear Many tech companies are 2-10x overstaffed
- 1 day earlier
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Gergely Orosz quoted
Their wordsa healthy oncall schedule needs 6+ engineers if every alert is to be taken seriously by an engineer whose main focus is oncall and systems stability.
↗The Pulse: Meta wanted to reduce teams by 60% because of AIblog.pragmaticengineer.com
- 2 days earlier
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Dillon Mulroy quoted
Principal engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026
Their wordsmy take has always been that "discipline doesn't scale" across teams and eng orgs and is a huge reason to use effect
- 3 weeks earlier
- CF
Chelsea Finn quoted
Assistant professor of computer science at Stanford
Their wordsI mean at the very least I actually think that just starting with a generalist policy and then fine-tuning it even like right off the bat uh can be really effective.
↗Chelsea Finn: This is the State of the Art in Roboticsyoutube.com 16th of 22 in this recording
- 10 days earlier
- TV
Tom Verrilli quoted
Chief product officer at the live-shopping marketplace Whatnot
Their wordsyou can have one very senior PM across more things and they can be more efficient than having, you know, three relatively entry-level PMs.
↗This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)youtube.com 6th of 24 in this recording
- TV
Tom Verrilli quoted
Their wordsgo and take the comp required to have five L5s reporting to one L7 and then four L7s reporting to one VP and now total the comp of that product org and turn around and say, what if I had three people?
↗This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)youtube.com 11th of 24 in this recording
- 5 days earlier
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Blake Scholl quoted
Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic
Their wordsThe key thing is to make hardware development look more like software development to reduce the cost of iteration both in the world of bits and in the world of atoms.
↗Blake Scholl: How 50 People Built a Supersonic Jetyoutube.com 8th of 22 in this recording
- 2 days earlier
- DH
David Heinemeier Hansson quoted
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals
Their wordsI'm worried, and still am, about a team of two, about a team of four, because they will produce software that's competitive with ours because it comes out of the same constraints. And therefore, our threat doesn't come from the behemoth.
↗DHH: How to Build a Profitable Company Without Losing Controlyoutube.com 1st of 15 in this recording
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David Heinemeier Hansson quoted
Their wordsSmall teams can do incredible things when they embrace their constraints
- JH
Jensen Huang quoted
Co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA since 1993
Their wordsTurns out paralegals are growing like crazy. And the reason for that is because the backlog of lawsuits is really high, and now these law firms could get a lot more cases through. And in order to do so, you got to hire more people.
↗Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIAyoutube.com 14th of 20 in this recording
- 2 weeks earlier
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Fabien Sanglard quoted
Programmer and writer known for detailed source code…
Our readingSmaller teams are better
Their wordsWe can accomplish more with smaller teams. We may not be far from the '90s model, when a team of four could produce professional software.
↗Don't you mean extinct?fabiensanglard.net 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 9 days earlier
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Kent Beck quoted
Creator of extreme programming and test-driven development
Their wordsSo how you write code, how you manage projects, who you hire, how many people, what the org structure is is completely different in the three phases.
↗How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industryyoutube.com 25th of 28 in this recording
- 3 weeks earlier
- MZ
Mark Zuckerberg quoted
Co-founder and chief executive of Meta Platforms
Our readingProgress in AI takes a very strong dozen or two researchers, not hundreds or thousands of them.
Their wordsin order to make progress in AI you don't need like many many hundreds of AI researchers um or thousands or anything like that I think you can really make progress with um you know a very strong group of a dozen or a couple dozen people.
↗“Curing All Disease by next century is too conservative" - Mark Zuckerbergyoutube.com 14th of 15 in this recording
- 5 weeks earlier
- MA
Mari Andrew quoted
Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet
Our readingA person does not need a friend group to find people for everyday activities and errands.
Their wordsThat said! I don't believe you need a group for the activity partners you're looking for. I don't even think you need friends per se for these day-to-day adventures.
↗How to make friendsmariandrew.substack.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 7 days earlier
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Polly D'Arcy quoted
VP of Design at Wealthsimple
Our readingSmaller teams are more effective.
Their wordsI'm a believer in small teams. Like I want to keep my team as small as possible and that's because I just have seen that smaller teams are more effective.
↗Polly D'Arcy - Going from IC to VP of Design at Wealthsimpleyoutube.com 18th of 24 in this recording