The Middle

Scoble likes small teams better, and I couldn't agree more.

Every project starts off with only a handful of people behind the wheel. They bring in a few select folks (likey people they've worked with before and have a high degree of confidence in), and through collective long nights, hack-a-thons, and internal arguments they put out some new product or service. The team rejoices, celebrates the release, and everyone feels like they've accomplished something special. The last item is the most important. On a small team, everyone feels like they 'own' the new release. It's their baby, they love it and can't wait to see it grow up.

This is exactly the point at which things start to go downhill.

There are two possible outcomes from this juncture. One is that the new product is a success, and some VP decides to continue funding and supporting its growth. Less interesting is the other case of product failure, where everyone says goodbye, moves onto some other team or company, and gets together every five years to talk about "The Good Old Days" working on SuperProduct X.

But if the product is good, then the higher-ups decide that it requires a lot of money (a.k.a. people) thrown at it to "leverage its synergies to develop market-wide penetration and enterprise scalability" or some such nonsense. Sooner than later, the project has 37 new developers, 13 new project managers, 7 dedicated marketing reps, a nationwide team of sales advocates, and worst of all, a roadmap that includes every feature under the sun, all slated for version 2.0.

This is when the wheels come off the bus. The pre-existing 'core team' feels like everything has been ruined by contamination from the outsiders, and the sense of ownership they previously had is replaced by a feeling of being just another cog in the wheel relentlessly grinding out feature requests and bug fixes. New development slows to a crawl as everyone learns the ins and outs of the product, and a horrific tangle of new management stands in the way of every advancement. The nimble, dedicated, customer-centric super team is destroyed, and a cadre of new folks who look at it as "just a job" fill their place. There are no more late nights. There is no impromptu hallway football game at at 3:00 AM while everyone is still working. It is a factory grinding out product to meet revenue and market share quotas passed down from on high. The new folks have no more ownership or pride in the product than the woman on the assembly line who screws the cap onto tubes of toothpaste.

I realize that Rome wasn't built in a day, and two guys at MS can't expect to write the next version of Office all by themselves. It's just that small teams have something magic about them, and I'm saddened every time I see that torn away in the name of 'progress'.

Growing up is hard to do.