Why Small Teams Are More Efficient

I was talking to someone recently who works in a product company. He told me about the transition the company is undergoing. They were building a product in EdTech for many years. The company was steadily growing for many years, but in the COVID years, the growth exploded. Of course, once the world started recovering from all the stress and lockdowns, the amount of people sitting at home and making use of newly found time to learn something started to go down too. The growth rate declined.

Unfortunately for everyone in the company, the board of directors decided to hire a new team of managers. The reason was that the company was no longer a startup but was operating like one, so the new management would need to put in place all the right processes and hopefully recover the lost growth rate. It took just one wrong person at a wrong place to completely halt any innovation in the company. Something that took days to do now takes months, because every change requires approval of six managers. It’s a death sentence, in my opinion, if they did not change this approach.

The Value of Wearing Multiple Hats

In a small company, there are no clear boundaries of what you can do. Imagine a small flower shop hiring a florist. Since the shop is small, the florist does a multitude of things (I’m making this up because I have no…