Why small teams ship faster

A four-person team can ship on Tuesday what a forty-person team is still scoping in March. It isn't talent — it's the math of coordination.

Every person you add multiplies the links between people. Four people have six possible conversations; ten have forty-five. Small teams skip the status meeting because everyone already heard it, and skip the handoff doc because whoever wrote the code also deploys it.

That shows up concretely: one decision-maker in the room, no other team to wait on, code review in twenty minutes instead of two days, and a deploy nobody has to schedule.

The tradeoff is real — less slack when someone's sick, less depth in any one specialty. But when speed matters most, keep the team small and the scope smaller.