Following Larsson in structuring teams

2024-01-09

The chapter right after the introduction of Larson, W. (2019). An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management. Stripe Press¹ concerns itself with sizing engineering teams. There’s a lot in this chapter – these points are salient for the moment:

• Managers should manage between 6 and 8 engineers
• A team with less than 4 members is not a true team
• Don’t create empty teams

These are what Larson calls ‘steady state’ principles, which can be violated during transitional periods². The first bullet provides a useful constant to orient one’s thinking around structuring teams. Relating to this, Larson provides this advice:

To create a new team, grow an existing team to eight to ten, and then bud into two teams of four or five

This is a method for splitting teams, but the reason for doing so needs to be drawn out a bit more. Namely, and with reference back to the ‘constant’ described above, a team should be split up when its scope exceeds what can be done by 6 to 8 engineers.

This sounds like it’s just common sense. Many engineering managers have done similar based on intuition, or observing symptoms that suggest a team has responsibility that exceeds its capacity³. Nonetheless there’s value in plainly stating the principle, and remembering where it derives from. In this case, it derives from a human-centric ‘constant’.