Smaller teams maximize speed with a sweet spot of several people.

This is in part because cognitive load and number of communication channels goes up exponentially with number of members, especially when a team optimizes for knowledge sharing across their domain. For this same reason, adding people to projects doesn’t often make them go faster. 5–9 contributors is the sweet spot.rS3


  1. Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, First Edition (New York: Crown Business, 2014). (See notes.)