Another reminder to keep your teams small
Another reminder to keep your teams small
You can build a lot with a handful of people... if you focus on the right things.
This is an extremely good post.
I don’t have much advice to add, but I can share some more numbers to add weight to it.
At no point in our 11 year history have we had a product team larger than 40 people. Until a few years ago I don’t think we ever had more than 25 people.
This includes the people designing and building new features, investigating customer reports, fixing bugs, doing shaping, keeping infrastructure running. Everything.
This covers a very big web app, a cross-platform native app with very high stability requirements, a cross-platform semi-native app with tens of thousands of users, and a few other smaller projects.
Everyone is able to work on everything. There is no codebase that any developer is not able to work on. Partially this comes from being disciplined with our stack and not having huge divergence. But mostly it’s a cultural thing: “I don’t know how to work on that” is rarely accepted, but if enough people legitimately can’t work on a codebase, we tackle that problem.1
Designers are shipping constantly.
I think the only thing DHH got wrong is the implication that when money was cheaper, it didn’t matter if you had a bigger team, and maybe it could be justified. During that time, we watched competitors raise hundreds of millions of dollars while we were 100% bootstrapping. It didn’t result in a better product.
Extreme individual productivity combined with intense customer focus has an incredible multiplying effect.
For example, we recently ported one of our apps from React Native to Rails + Turbo Native, because the old version was such a pain to work on.