Great products are made by small teams of specialists

From Wright Brothers to the iPhone, small teams of specialists are consistently responsible for radically innovative products

A black and white picture of Wilbur, left, and Orville Wright sit on the porch steps of their Dayton, Ohio, home in June 1909. Picture by Wikimedia Commons from Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. — Wilbur and Orville Wright, 1909 — Wikimedia Commons

You don’t need a lot of people to build a great product.

There are countless examples of small teams bringing exciting, radical innovations to the world:

Instagram
The original iPhone and iPod
The Macintosh
YouTube
WhatsApp
Google
The Wright brothers

The list goes on and the stories behind them are fascinating.

Some researchers actually measured this pattern. A 2017 paper found that, while large teams develop and refine existing technologies, small teams disrupt the status quo:

“Small teams have disrupted science and technology by exploring and amplifying promising ideas from older and less popular work. Large teams have developed recent successes, solving acknowledged problems and refining common designs.”—Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, James A. Evans

Startups and small teams

Part of the reason I love working with startups is that I get to tackle new problems for which there’s no frame of reference.

This is where design creates the most value. It sources information from the environment, identifies a problem people really care about, and envisions a path to a solution.

This process is very fast in startups. You’re a small group of people with different specialties that can focus on a concrete problem and collaborate on solutions.

But the more people you add to that initial team, the more they’ll be weighted down by problems of alignment, communication, and politics.

“…you put all these supersmart people with huge egos into very tight, confined quarters, with that kind of pressure, and crazy stuff starts to happen.“— Andy Grignon, The Verge

It’s an inverse correlation: The larger the team, the slower it moves.

But why?

Speed of alignment

Alignment is a collection of agreements on what everyone should do, how, and when. Aligned teams are effective and move very fast. It’s much easier to align a small group of people. And design is uniquely positioned to create that alignment. But larger groups are a different story. Aligning lots of people means attending lots meetings.

The more people you have, the more time you need to spend keeping everybody up to speed. That also means introducing managers. People whose only role is to organize the work of other people.

“…the great thing about the culture at the time was the very small, very cohesive teams” — Ken Kocienda, Principal Engineer at Apple and part of the original iPhone team.

A small team of experienced specialists doesn’t need any of that. They can easily agree on a direction and self-manage their own execution.

Which brings me to the next point.

Talent density

Talent density refers to the concentration of high-performing, skilled, and motivated individuals within a team.

“A company with really dense talent is a company everyone wants to work for. High performers especially thrive in environments where the overall talent density is high”— Vugar Mehdiyev

As companies grow, they lower the bar for hiring in order to fill supporting roles. They bring in junior talent and poor fits.

Now there’s nothing wrong with hiring juniors and it’s absolutely necessary that we support them as they’ll be the senior talent of the future. But some people get hired on qualifications alone rather than motivation, drive or cultural fit. Poor fits dilute the performance of the team as their motivation and attitude aren’t aligned with everyone else’s. And for the purposes of technological innovation, you need skills and motivation. Skills alone won’t cut it.

This is especially evident when it comes to doing work outside one’s expertise. Many people are over-specialized on one thing and can’t —or won’t— contribute to tasks that fall slightly outside their domain. But great-fit, skillful and motivated team members embrace challenges with a growth mindset.

Information silos

The more people you have, the higher the chances they’ll work in isolated groups that don’t talk to each other often. That isolation increases the chances of two people unknowingly working on the same problem, or worse, on a problem that has already been solved.

I once worked at a company where people didn’t stay for very long and teams didn’t communicate with each other. It was common to find old design files with solutions to problems the company was currently facing. But the information silos made this stuff difficult to track.

This is a massive waste of time for everybody.

Red tape

Imagine asking your company for a software license and receiving this as a response:

— Hi, I’d like to buy software XYZ
— Hello, in order get a software license you need to fill out form AB-1-9010 and OT-0167 and send it to IT for approval with an explanation for why the software is needed, where their servers located, a comparison to their competitors and a justification for choosing them instead.

Can you imagine doing all that for a license you need to do your job?

Believe it or not, that’s the reality of most people working in large teams, where bureaucracy runs rampant as a result of poor adaptations to regulations and inefficient processes.

Small teams don’t have to deal with that. They can just share 2 lines on why they need something and agree to buy it or not.

“With fewer layers of bureaucracy and a more streamlined hierarchy, small teams are able to communicate more effectively and make decisions more efficiently. In lean teams, there are fewer barriers to sharing ideas, exchanging information, and providing feedback.”— Joshua M. Evans

Autonomy

The navbar of our product at Zoios had some inconsistent icons that had been bothering me for a while.

One Friday between projects, I created a branch, tried out different icons, and when I was happy with the result I shared them with the team. We all liked them so I pushed them to production.

It all took less than a hour.

Yes, I can write some code, but I’m not a developer. I just used ChatGPT to help me navigate the codebase.

The point is that in small teams of specialists each member has —and should have— a large degree of autonomy.

Standardizing icons isn’t radical innovation, but it also doesn’t require a full-blown project. Rather than waiting for prioritization —which may take weeks or months since it’s a “tiny thing”— we’re able to get it done quickly between other tasks.

Autonomy is critical. The less each member depends on permissions, revisions and approvals, for small things, the faster the product improves.

Small teams in large companies

Just because a company is big that doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t benefit from small teams of highly talented people.

If you can give a small team full autonomy over a product, without having to deal with a bunch of stakeholders for approvals, you can actually get people to produce extraordinary results.

The classic example of a large company working as a bunch of startups is Apple during the Jobs era. The Macintosh and the iPhone, were both originally conceived by small teams, handpicked for their skills.

Innovation thrives when a few talented people move fast, align quickly, and act autonomously. Large teams, while stable, often slow progress with bureaucracy and silos. While small, cross-functional teams with autonomy outpace their competitors almost with ease.