Small Teams > Big Teams

I think it was the early days of Amazon that invented the “pizza rule,” meaning no team should be bigger than the # of people that can be fed by two pizzas — so, probably six to eight individuals. If you’ve literally ever had a job, you know that the really big teams are awful and accomplish virtually nothing, because it just becomes a series of cross-talk and reply-alls and battles about political ground and potential advancement. I’ve never been on really innovative R&D teams, but I do generally understand human nature, and I can only imagine even a good R&D team falls prey to these issues as they get bigger.

I had this chicken fart of a job years ago at some luxury travel consortium called Virtuoso. Regularly, we would have these 15-person teams deployed onto something completely meaningless — like a non-priority that some senior VP assigned us to get us out of his hair for a month. No one had any idea what the team was supposed to do, and then we got some format where we had to start every meeting with “The point of this meeting is _____,” and it was one of the most painful three months of my life to sit on these things. At the same time, my marriage was collapsing and I was drinking like a fish — probably in part because of this professional arc. It was not a good year.

Well, now we have some research from Northwestern that underscores a lot of what we all inherently knew:

Want to Revolutionize Your Field? You May Need to Rethink the Size of Your Research Team.

Large and small teams produce different types of breakthroughs, according to an analysis of 50 million patents…

insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu

Here’s your nut graf:

In a 2019 study, Wang and his coauthors analyzed the citation patterns of 50 million papers, patents, and software products developed between 1954 and 2014. They found that large-team projects indeed garner more citations and accumulate them faster. But these large teams primarily develop upon existing research, rather than proposing new directions. Meanwhile, small teams tend to forge entirely new paths of discovery.

This is mostly about research teams trying to get patents, which is the easiest way to track these studies and it’s how you usually see these studies defined. That’s limiting because not every organization is looking for patents — many are just looking for STONE COLD CASH, BABY!!! — but it’s one way to consider all this stuff.

The study here basically says: “If you want to do innovative, groundbreaking work, you need people willing to distance themselves from established norms.” Makes sense. As a team gets bigger, there are more politics and more of a pull back to the status quo. Also makes sense. So, big teams can achieve things, but the things they achieve are probably going to be within 1–2 degrees of the existing status quo. Makes sense: Congress is a “big team” and whenever they achieve something, it’s literally a small iota removed from what previously existed. Meanwhile, we give most of the iPhone credit to Jobs and Ive, and that’s a very small team. That shifted the world, product-wise.

I’d always opt for small, nimble teams that then break apart and become small teams dedicated to another project. Big, lumbering teams with pointless, constant meetings to “check in” are hell to be on, and don’t accomplish much of anything notable. (Sometimes, but it’s rare.)

Where do you come down on big vs. small, team-wise?