Growing your team too quickly is one of the worst mistakes you can make

I know this might seem like odd advice coming from someone who helps companies build out their product teams, but honestly, growing too quickly (especially in the wrong areas) will lead to a world of pain.

If you are early stage, pre-product / market fit you should try and stay as small as you possibly can. Here’s why…

1. Development inefficiencies
Too much stuff in the backlog? Loads of ideas piling up? Throw more people at it right? Wrong! One of the universal truths of software development is that your dev team will never be big enough…get comfortable with that.

The key is to make sure you are working on the most valuable stuff at all times. Get used to making hard trade offs.
If you hire too many devs now you will waste a tonne of time trying to manage them all and have them work on useful stuff. An outcome of that scenario is that the product will bloat. User journeys get messy, getting users to value takes longer (or doesn’t happen at all), there’s an ever growing list of things to maintain and progress grinds to a halt.

You don’t need that.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard founders complain that progress with a dev team is so much slower than when it was just them hacking it out on their kitchen table.

If you are still make large course corrections in the product you want to stay at 2–3 devs max and force yourself to make everything as cheaply and quickly as possible until you’ve validated out your product.

2. Other teams put pressure on product and engineering when they are not mature enough to cope with it.
We just had our first board meeting and the investors want us to start thinking about hitting sales numbers ready for our next round. We need customers, and loads of them! Let’s build a sales and marketing team!

Really? Do you? If you are pre p/mf you can probably get enough customers to be validating with through some basic outreach and community work. Going too early on these teams will cause a number of problems;

• Sale and Marketing teams will be trying to sell a product that is not necessarily fit for purpose, where the value proposition isn’t clear, and that doesn’t have a well defined ideal customer profile. You’ll definitely learn a lot about those things (if you have a good enough team), but you also have a tonne of failure and frustration with your team AND customers. Those people likely won’t come back to buy from you

• You’ll start getting lots of complaints and feature requests coming into product. “If only we had X feature I could sell to this whale of a company I’ve lined up.” These things will create a tonne of noise making it hard to identify and focus on the stuff that really matters.

• Sales people like to sell and make commission. If they are not doing that they will leave. Marketing teams like to generate leads and have work to do. If they can’t do that they will get board and start causing distractions / also leave.

3. Keeping the ship motivated and heading in the right direction becomes really hard
People are smart. They know when things aren’t going well and they get worried about their job. Are they performing well enough? Perhaps if they used their initiative and started doing XYZ? Is the company ever going to be successful? Will they even have a job in 12 months?

All this leads to them (understandably) asserting themselves in a variety of ways that you will end up having to deal with.

Additionally, because you’ve not perhaps found p/mf yet, got your pricing strategy sorted, know who you’re selling to etc etc, you’re going to be changing tack. A lot. That causes additional uncertainty and stress and every time things change you have explain it to the whole company, get them onboard, explain why the thing they were doing is no longer useful and instead you want them to put their heart and sole into this new thing.

That’s actually quite easy when you have a small team who are close to the problems and can see why a change is needed.

It’s really tough when you have a larger team (even 15+ people) who are just trying to execute on the thing you asked them to do yesterday.

When you’re having to move quickly to build a product people actually want, the fewer nodes of communication required to do that, the better.

Of course, if you’ve read all this and you are still looking to build out your product team, head on over to productheads.io and get in touch!