Team Size

The optimal team size is 4.6 people.

Dave Farley in his book Modern Software Engineering argues we need to organize for the optimal team size.
Small teams working autonomously on small projects.
If the project is too big and complicated, it’ll inevitably slow down.
Adding more people won’t then speed it up.

It takes great leadership that gives trust to people and protects people from a bombardment of unrealistic project requirements to make this happen.
It takes great organizational insight to say no to massive, confusing projects.
They need to be destructured into smaller, independent pieces, that people can wrap their heads around and take ownership of.

People will take ownership and give their best, if you provide the organizational structure and atmosphere to let them.
If you throw too many people at an overcomplicated project, trying to manage it with a bunch of policies and processes, you are taking away the possibilities for people to take ownership and care for the project.

How many people work in your team?
Is it effective?
How much gatekeeping and slowdown is there going on?
How much communication overhead and pointless meetings have you got going on?

Unfortunately, this is mostly a leadership issue.
But we can look out for opportunities and think about which teams we want to join.