It has been some time since Elon Musk’s dramatic takeover of Twitter and the aftermath. Musk laid off a good portion of the Twitter team. A refrain I commonly hear is—see, Twitter seems to be running fine with a lean team.
Everything is great
Just because you anecdotally see nothing wrong with Twitter does not mean everything is fine and dandy with the product.
It takes time to see the effects of laying offs. Things slowly start breaking and then compound—like how good things compound, bad ones too compound. Bugs start creeping up slowly and then become chronic. Executing simple tasks takes a bit more time and then a lot more. Security reliability and developer productivity start taking a back seat to user-facing features; they are essential for the long-term health of a product but are challenging to justify in the short term, especially in a resource-crunched environment lacking technical leadership.
Doing more with fewer people
Musk has brought efficiency into front and center, which was overlooked in an environment of excess.
If you are in a big tech company, having more reports is equated with accomplishing more and is a path to promotion and growth. If you are in a startup, the bigger the team size, the larger the funding and valuation. Resumes and LinkedIn profiles beam with pride about having built mammoth engineering teams. There is hardly any incentive to do more with fewer people.
When a startup I was with got acquired by a bigger company, the work we were doing was done by a team 5x our size in the acquiring company. It was not that we were magically more efficient; we took deliberate decisions keeping our small team front and center. We did not have a not-invented-here syndrome. We leveraged open-source, cloud, and hosted products wherever possible, enabling us to build more with less people. Observability and developer productivity were integral to everything we made; this allowed us to move fast and debug problems efficiently without throwing people at them.
I am not justifying red-lining teams or inviting the dreaded 996 Chinese work culture. But, if you make operating with a small team a cornerstone of your culture, you can be lean and mean while maintaining sanity.
Ending thoughts
It takes time to see the impact of losing institutional knowledge. There is no way for an external person to briefly look at a product’s facade and proclaim things are fine. Building a good product is more grinding backstage work than what one sees in the limelight.
You can build successful companies with razor-thin teams. It takes deliberation, focus, and explicit product decisions; operating with a small team should be in the company’s DNA and not an afterthought.
It is tough to pivot a company like Twitter to this; that is probably why Elon Musk is rebuilding the company from scratch with shock therapy.
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Photo by Samrat Maharjan.
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