Freelancers, companies that help in such scenarios. If certain tasks are absolutely vital for the project and un-done, I would first seek outside help. Sadly there’s no rule of thumb for team scaling. If you are too early, you can add unnecessary overhead. The real challenge is to figure out what’s the right time to expand or shrink your team. Now its in the 2nd month of coding, you start. You continue on it for 3 weeks, you realize that you are getting bored doing it.

When creating something new, be extra careful before you expand your team. Answer: Consider this situation : You are working alone in the nights, with no one to appreciate your product until it is out.

Do we even have to finish all those tasks?.

That mentality never works 😉 Rather ask your self:

I have to expand the team because we have a lot of tasks to complete.

We’ll at least if they are talking to each other 😃 The too many tasks argument But combined, they spend way more than 4h to communicate with each other. Sure combined two engineers work 16 hours a day. There’s a reason why companies like SpaceX prefer one engineer who works 12h a day, over two engineers who both work 8h a day. The team was expended way too early.Įxtra people will just increase the team complexity, add management overhead, and reduce communication efficiency. Yet despite all of his sub-team management, his junior team members barely making any progress. The expert complained that he spends 90% of his time managing the sub-team instead of using his expertise. At one meeting, the project boss was complaining about the lack of progress by the electronics sub-team. He was also the critical engineer for one of the electronics boards. On the project I worked on, we had an expert for electronics. Most people don’t account for that when adding team members. Team expansion causes communication overhead. But in most cases, adding extra people won’t solve your problem. Unfortunately, a lot of people have the tendency to throw bodies at the problem. Sure today, a committee dictates the development of those languages.īut those ideas were brought to the world by a single person then further developed by a larger team. Some of today’s most used programming languages like C++, python, JavaScript were developed and proposed by a single person. To refresh your memory, the other Steve co-founder of Apple. We don’t need to look further than the technology sector for a few examples.Īpple’s first computers, Apple I & II, were designed by Steve Wozniak. Nothing revolutionary was ever made by a committee. If everyone can influence your decisions and everyone has to agree, you won’t get anywhere. Because when you are creating something new, the idea is fragile. As a leader of those teams, I failed to recognize how stuck we were in agreement/managerial process. In the past two years, I got stuck twice in a team where we were trying to get everyone up to speed and agree. No project failed when the team consisted of star players. Did you ever end up in a situation where a project failed because of the team? But not because of the incapability of team members.

One man band app