Every achievement has a denominator

Having lived through a few "reduction in force" experiences, I'm always wary of growing my orgs too quickly. Not only are they monetarily expensive, they're also harder to coordinate and communicate with.

Managers are incentivised to grow their empire. The more people reporting to them, the bigger their title, the higher their comp. But this is the wrong approach to take. From the article:

Lots of people take pride in their ability to manage large organizations. And with thousands of people in your org, you kinda better do something fucking great. But what if you instead took pride in your ability to deliver outsize results with a small denominator?

This is something I take pride in. Constraints fuel creativity. People are always amazed at how one of my teams can support 15 products, built by 180 people, as a team of five. The answer is that we're creative. We find new ways of working. We invest in tooling. We choose the most important things to work on.

When I think about impact, I'm always thinking about the denominator.