Small teams consistently out-deliver their larger counterparts. There’s a reason organizations turn to “skunkworks” projects when it’s time to shake things up: these small teams, with membership stolen from other, well-funded projects, are forced to innovate because of their constraints. Small teams and limited resources force focus (see: DeepSeek).
The real secret to creating value lies in answering two important questions: What should we build? and Why build it now? Developers are great at figuring out how to build something, but if they’re building the wrong thing, for the wrong reasons, at the wrong time: it’s not going to move the needle.
But large development teams are expensive. Every second they sit idle is money burning, so product teams are motivated to fill the development pipeline with stuff to keep it moving. That stuff may be valuable eventually, or it may not.
A small team means greater focus on your product's core goals. More time spent on the what and the why.
Related: Running a lean research process
More people means more coordination. That’s true for both inputs and outputs. If that coordination isn’t perfectly efficient (and it never is), that means more risk for less reward.
In a larger team, there are more plates to fill with work. If Product and Design aren’t far enough ahead, and don’t stay ahead, developers end up spinning their wheels with make-work.
There’s also more output—which means more testing. If some of the code coming through the pipeline is unnecessary, some of that testing is also unnecessary (adding both time and spend).
Smaller teams, on the other hand, mean inputs are more thoughtful, development more focused, and releases are geared to value, at a lower burn.
Related: Driving Value in Digital Transformation
When you’re not scrambling to keep the development pipeline full (of mostly lower value work), you can target specific outcomes on every release. That means less code touched, across less surfaces.
The more focused the work in a release, the lower the risk of bugs, regressions, and vulnerabilities, across less of the codebase. And that means more time available to thoroughly test security, privacy controls, and regulatory compliance.
Less chaos, less risk of human error or breach.
Related: Deliver on Time
It’s Strata’s job to deliver value. We consistently achieve that by focusing our attention on the important questions—nailing the details for every release, reducing the time to turnaround new features, maintaining high quality, and hitting the marks on compliance. We consistently outperform large scrum teams because we only do work that creates value.
Don’t waste your budget on a large team when a small one drives better results.
James Barr founded Strata Research in 2019 and loves small teams because he can keep up with all the dev threads.
