Fitting together those guiding principles, the playbook that I’ve developed is surprisingly simple and effective: Teams should be six to eight during steady state. To create a new team, grow an existing team to eight to ten, and then bud into two teams of four or five. Never create empty teams. Never leave managers supporting more than eight individuals. Like all guidelines, this is a structure to aid thinking through sizing problems, not a straitjacket to restrict every exception. The context of any situation deserves careful examination, but increasingly I’ve found that the long-term costs
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