The Tiny Teams Playbook
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
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Team ManagementProductivitySoftware Development
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Team Management
Productivity
Software Development
The Tiny Teams Playbook discusses strategies for small teams to be effective, sparking discussion on topics like tech stack choices, work environment, and team culture.
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Oct 8, 2025 at 8:50 AM EDT
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Or simply put: if you truly want the best, most focused, highly performing team, an office requirement shrinks your talent pool tremendously for extremely little gain. Do quarterly meetups somewhere and move on, IMO.
Software development is a team sport and individual productivity is not the same as team productivity. Communication bandwidth in person is much higher when colocated. Startups move fast and higher bandwidth increases velocity, reduces errors, improves quality and team cohesion.
For other situations remote can be “good enough”, and has advantages eg bigger recruitment pool or cheaper labour, but in general in person is just going to be a lot faster with higher quality results.
A lot of engineers don’t wish this to be true, because wfh is often better for them as individuals, but it is what it is.
If you’re an engineer or developer mostly working a backlog, totally different story - wherever you are most comfortable working is ideal.
Either way, dogma is terrible. I have a friend who is a specialist in a specific area of finance who has been WFH for 20 years. Now she’s commuting to an office in a city about 300 miles away from the rest of her team, because the big boss says come to the office.
Agree, and the difference between the floor and ceiling is typically leadership. Not just by the executives but everyone who works there.
this is true, and irrelevant to my reasoning.
Sometimes individual productivity isn’t even the measure of success and sometimes it needs to be sacrificed for group productivity.
I have heard people state this like it is obviously true. Not so sure.
It’s at odds with being pro-AI too. If you can’t effectively collaborate with somebody who is not physically present but is just a voice on a call or words on a screen, what does that imply about how effectively you can collaborate with AI? Are these people building robot bodies for Claude’s GPUs and making those robot bodies sit in office chairs across from them? Would that make them more productive?
One could argue that some AIs are like SOME humans. After all, you and I are both humans but we are not the same and no reason why our colleagues would interact with us in the same way. Nuance
I used to work in an environment with often 8 hours of meetings straight. People had their headsets on while being in meetings and were simultaneously programming and when they heard their name mentioned they tried to say something smart. It was a terribly inefficient way to work.
Then I switched to an environment where we took "Almost no meetings" seriously and it was a tremendous boost. After a year or so I realized that we left a lot of potential efficiency untapped because of lack of communication or miss-communication.
Now I think there must be a middle ground - an optimum of communication for an optimum of efficiency. Teams need to be actively steered to that, just hiring good communicators and hoping for the best is probably not going to work. You need meetings. At least some. And some seemingly inefficient meetings will prevent inefficiency elsewhere.
Everything I wrote above was about highly distributed teams working remotely. The Tiny Teams Playbook has also
"In Person: either have an office, or VERY frequent AirBnB hack weeks"
in it, which changes things quite a bit.
Ideas, concepts, implementation plans are first written down as a proposal, which is read by others and discussed online. Meetings are only required if there are blockers to resolve, or differences in opinion.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
>Researchers generally hold that a system is required to do all of the following to be regarded as an AGI:[34]
> - reason, use strategy, solve puzzles, and make judgments under uncertainty > - represent knowledge, including common sense knowledge > - plan > - learn > - communicate in natural language > - if necessary, integrate these skills in completion of any given goal
Modern AI can do all of those.
Also didn't care for the hiring section and how dystopian that feels, well unless you're independently wealthy I guess. People really want to recreate monarchy in the work place.
Or, alternatively, respect personal boundaries and don't force coworkers to have social outings.
I really wish "work is just work" was more popular. There is an empathetic way to do this that isn't just treating people as a number but also not forcing socializing outside of the context of work.
Yes to avoiding burnout. No to thinking a retreat is the answer to that.
Have an onsite team or have hybrid setups that bring people within geographic areas together. Nothing replaces getting around a physical whiteboard in a physical space.
Context is in the original statement that retreats are a fix for burnout.
The concept being that you break things down and layer in details so the evolution is explained similar to the train of thought from live sessions.
I've been remote almost exclusively since 2012 and have used everything out there... the biggest thing that makes an improvement with remote comms? A very high quality microphone with a high quality compressor / gate (hardware, even) and using Mumble / Teamspeak / etc with a good codec where everyone can hear everyone speaking at the same time with low latency. That's what we lost from copper phones and it's exponentially worse in Zoom where you can't tell when someone is trying to interrupt you with the auditory cues. It really makes a big difference.
I'm an extrovert so I love video / cams on but really audio is all that is needed when paired with a tool like Figjam and getting high quality audio makes a remarkable difference.
Absolutely. Pay, in real money, today. (as opposed to promises of future riches if all goes well)
If you're trying to do more with less, you can't afford not to.
more thoughts after about 6 months of stewing with the Tiny Teams idea:
the more work experience I have in tech, the more I see the inverse relationship between size of team and velocity on projects. I think Zuck aside, the race towards 10-20mm comp packages (this is real btw) for high velocity AI engineers (both the kind that are very good at using coding agents and the kind that ship AI products) is a direct economic consequence of this very human observation meshed with the reduction in cost of shipping software as long as you have a very good supervisor/prompter/architect to keep things on rails.
I actually think the biggest casualty of this is 1) people with "bullshit jobs" in tech e.g. "product managers" that are actually "project managers" that call in on zoom from their poolside to ask "ok what's your ETA on that?" on their jira board twice a week, and 2) the VC industry since (if you dont pay a ton of cash comp) companies are close to profitable (https://www.swyx.io/cognition) after an initial ramp due to the insane labor leverage. the one-and-done round i think is going to be increasingly common in VC.
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