What makes small teams so effective at moving fast?

Most companies go slow because of plodding decision making and opaque alignment, and smaller teams naturally don't have this problem. Conventional wisdom says "add more resources" to go faster, but it rarely works out that way. Every person you add is another person to coordinate with, convince, and keep in the loop.

When Twitter acquired Bagcheck in 2011, Sam (our CTO) and I were shipping multiple times a day. We started with a command line interface to figure out what objects and actions we needed before building any UI, then used logic-less templates so I could iterate on the front end while Sam managed the back end. With just two of us, we never got stuck waiting on a decision or a sync meeting. As I've said before, making decisions quickly has way more impact on shipping velocity than how hard a team works.

So why does this matter even more now? AI. Armed with highly capable AI systems, everyone (designer, developer, etc.) on a team can get more done. In big teams, though, these new capabilities smack head first into the decision-making and alignment problems that have always been there. In small teams, they don't.

The handoff waiting that used to justify bigger teams is shrinking fast. Bagcheck never crossed four employees, and Polar was five people when Google acquired it in 2014, both before AI coding agents existed. Today, the number of people you need to get a lot done fast is probably a lot smaller than you think.

One caution though: speed is a double-edged sword. Because you can whip something up so quickly, you lose constraint, and constraint is valuable. The time we used to spend thinking helped us cull ideas and get things crisper. Small teams still need to say no to most things.

So keep the team tiny, give it the autonomy to decide, and protect the time to think. Fewer people deciding faster beats more people working harder.