How Teams Change At Different Sizes

During my career I've had the chance to work on teams of a lot of different sizes. During that time I've come to realize there are really six "buckets" of team sizes. At each bucket, ICs + team leads need to operate a little differently in order to be successful within those teams. The sizes are:

• 1 Person: Do what you want, YOLO
• 2 → 3 People: An ideal small squad.  Team can stay in touch with daily slack-ups and maybe an ad-hoc meeting when necessary.  In a remote world you probably need a weekly sync, but in-person that may not be necessary.
• 4 → 5 People: The size at which "which get everyone into a room" is a productive strategy whenever you have a challenge.  This is the size at which one seems to be able to tech lead and  manage as well.  You probably need a weekly sprint planning meeting to get on the same page because you've split into two squads.  This also  conveniently lines up with the first of Dunbar's numbers.
• 6 → 9 people: The platonic team size.  One manager, eight engineers, maybe a product manager.  Order your two pizzas, appreciate the fact that you have a good balance of size and redundancy, and execute away.
• 10 → 12 people: Team has likely become a little sprawling but may not have an exact obvious cut point.  Often characterized by needing to share lots of context between people because of the broad scope, and a manager who is being pulled in a bunch of directions.  Team is strained, but not breaking. Chances are ICs will be doing some "gap filling" to make sure the team communicates well here.
• 13+ people: GG.  This isn't even a team anymore; just an overwhelmed manager and a bunch of sub-teams who secretly need to break off, but they can't, either because there's no one to manage the right sub-teams or the boundaries between "what should be the sub-teams" are not clear.

Of course, these aren't THE ONLY team models that exist, but I find them to be generally useful baseline rules when thinking about "how should I operate within a team"

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