Daniel Judge

“Small teams (fewer than four members) are not teams I’ve sponsored quite a few teams of one or two people, and each time I’ve regretted it. To repeat: I have regretted it every single time. An important property of teams is that they abstract the complexities of the individuals that compose them. Teams with fewer than four individuals are a sufficiently leaky abstraction that they function indistinguishably from individuals. To reason about a small team’s delivery, you’ll have to know about each on-call shift, vacation, and interruption. They are also fragile, with one departure easily moving them from innovation back into toiling to maintain technical debt.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.”
― Adlai E. Stevenson

“Keep innovation and maintenance together. A frequent practice is to spin up a new team to innovate while existing teams are bogged down in maintenance. I’ve historically done this myself, but I’ve moved toward innovating within existing teams.5 This requires very deliberate decision-making and some bravery, but in exchange you’ll get higher morale and a culture of learning, and will avoid creating a two-tiered class system of innovators and maintainers.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.”
― Jocko Willink, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win