I have faced this question multiple times whenever there is a change in team or new team is being created. I am sure other engineering managers(at junior level or senior level) face this situation. I will just present my views in this post, don’t consider this a guide to team sizing as many considerations go into deciding teams and it can be a subjective exercise depending on various organisation factors.

What is a team?

First of all we should look at what a team is in your organisation. First and most important thing is that a team is group of diverse skilled individuals. A team in an organisation is generally owner of one or more parts of project or part of a product or whole product depending on size of the project or product. They have a clearly defined purpose. Members in the team work collectively to achieve their goal and depend on each other for skills, knowledge, resources etc. A team has a collective accountability for achieving the goal and individuals work together to achieve that.

Small Teams

If we look at above definition of a team, most important part of team are their members, individual skilled members who collectively need to achieve the goal of a team. Now, not every individual can be perfect, members might not have all the qualities required which are expected out of a team, for example, from a team we will expect very high quality of code, speedy deliveries, a reliable, scalable, performant product, tendency to do research and innovate, bring new initiatives, keep documentations and project trackers upto date etc. One skilled individual might not have all these qualities, some will be very good at writing high quality code but sloppy in updating project tracker, some will be research oriented and will design a innovative solution but might not like to spend much time reviewing other’s work etc. etc. If your team is very small, let’s say 2-3 engineers, then collectively team might not meet all defined expectations because of not having a group of diverse qualities. If one manager is managing only a small team of 2-3 engineers, then it might create another problem of micromanagement in the team. If manager have very less people to manage then they will either start creating work for their teams, or will start doing hands on work with team which will render them Tech Leads instead of Tech Managers.

Conclusion

In this post I have not given any guidelines on how to size the teams, but have just highlighted my experiences and challenges with different sizes of teams. I have faced these challenges, but as a manager we need to make it work as circumstance might alway not permit you to right size your teams. And navigating those challenges pushes me to do better everyday, pushes me learn something new.