7 / The paradox of scale

Welcome to Issue 7!

I was talking to a good friend this week who recently left a job at a huge corporation, and I was disheartened to hear how much of her, and her colleagues', time was dedicated to managing work instead of actually getting work done.

• Senior leadership couldn’t agree on what metrics to measure, so teams kept building ever expanding dashboards

• Silos prevented standardization and resource sharing

• Whole departments dedicated to resolving inter-team communication and conflicts

• Declining returns and a push to cut costs everywhere

There’s a persistent, seductive belief that adding more people and processes leads to outsized productivity gains–I’ve seen too many slide decks and docs extolling how this next change means two plus two equals five.

Yet, in reality, adding more nodes to a system just creates more complexity that needs to be managed.

Herein lies the paradox of scale: when a node is added to a system, every node produces less output because more of their time is spent on managing the increase in connections. So, the real challenge isn’t adding nodes, it’s how to mitigate the loss in output as you add them.

I’ve seen teams try just about every trick in the book to fight this, and a couple of strategies have stood out to me:

• Having founders/leaders who literally fight to preserve as much deep focus time as possible for their teams.

• Hiring folks who are entrepreneurial self-starters who can operate independently.

• Breaking large groups into smaller ones. (But, this is how silos emerge if there are no bridges between them!)

As I continue talking to more product folks, I want to explore more approaches and learn how they handle this paradox. Hopefully, we’ll find a silver bullet one day, but my gut tells me we’re in for a lot of lead ones.

Is this something you’ve experienced? How have you dealt with it? Hit reply and let me know!

Let’s get Technically Lit,

Nick

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