Victims of Your Own Success

Slowing things down with the company’s growth

If you’ve ever worked in a small company that has grown into a big company, you may have experienced the feeling that things have slowed down as you’ve gotten bigger. The time it takes to make decisions, the time it takes to ship new features, and the time it takes to merge code and for it to be deployed to production all seem to increase.

The Mythical Man-MonthFrederick P. Brooks Jr. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA, Anniversary, 1995. had this covered way back in 1975 with a concept that became known as Brooks’ Law: “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” In fact, this observation can be made more generally. Adding more personpower to a team, department, or company makes everything more complicated. Knowledge work cannot be easily split into discrete tasks, and there’s always communication involved. You can’t chop a programming project into two without increasing the amount of communication required to get it done. So, even if your team, department, or company has grown, you can’t expect a linear return on investment for the number of people added.

Even though this concept has been around for longer than many people have been on the planet, it still comes up time and time again:

• People within the business may be frustrated with the progress from Engineering. After all, you’re three times as big now, so why aren’t you doing three times the work?

• Your users may feel like you’ve slowed down as you’ve become more ...