You Need Fewer People, Not More

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Companies are cutting costs, and many abandon their transformation efforts in the process. The reaction? Hiring freezes and downsizing entire teams. But here’s the thing: Most teams aren’t suffering because they’re too small—they’re struggling because they’re too big and too unstable.

Stability Over Headcount

"Great teams are built on a foundation of stability, shared history, and trust that can only be developed over time." — Daniel Coyle

A strong software team isn’t about having more people—it’s about having the right people, and keeping them together. Ideally, team members should stay with their team for at least a year. This is essential for truly understanding customers, complex business logic, work methodologies, dependencies, and software architecture.

Constantly reshuffling teams disrupts everything. Each time you change the lineup, the team regresses through Tuckman’s stages: Forming, Storming, Norming, and only then—if you’re lucky—Performing. More people won’t fix this. More stability will.

Cross-Functional, But Not Overloaded

Tech teams need all the skills necessary to deliver from idea to deployment without depending on external approvals or bottlenecks. This includes:

✅ Identifying customer needs
✅ Writing and deploying code
✅ Testing and running software

A classic mistake? Adding more specialized roles. The more specialists you have, the harder it is to get things done. Instead, the best teams operate in a cross-functional way where individuals broaden their skills over time. A front-end developer might pick up back-end tasks, a product manager might handle business analysis, and developers might take on QA. This shift from T-shaped to V- or M-shaped skills is a game changer for efficiency.

The Magic Number for Team Size

Small enough to be agile, big enough to be effective—that’s the goal. The sweet spot? Five to eleven people.

Why? Because of Dunbar’s Number, which suggests that humans handle social connections best in groups of about 5-15. Amazon’s famous "two-pizza teams" follow this logic: if a team needs more than two pizzas to feed them, it’s too big.

Oversized teams split into ineffective subgroups. Tiny teams struggle with workload and lack diversity. Finding the right balance is key to maintaining momentum without creating inefficiencies.

The Bottom Line

If you’re facing budget cuts, don’t just reduce costs—reduce complexity. Keep your teams stable, cross-functional, and the right size. That’s how you maintain speed and quality, even in tough times.