Team structure and growth

Growing teams requires intentional structure. When everyone reports to one person, that leader becomes a bottleneck. At 10 people, you have 45 possible communication paths between team members. At 50 people, that jumps to 1,225 paths, making coordination nearly impossible.

Build small teams of 6-8 people maximum. Amazon calls this the "two-pizza rule." If two pizzas can't feed the team, it's too big. Each team should own a specific part of the product completely. For example, one team owns search, another owns checkout, another owns user profiles. Connect teams through regular sync points and a shared vision of the product, and standards of development (like design system for the frontend and code standards for the software) without creating dependencies.