Communication Overhead

Tags
efficiencymanagement
Published
February 8, 2025

After returning from a recent offsite with my founders, I’ve been reflecting on the lessons learned from our clients. Our discussions led to several strategic pivots. Naturally, discussion on how we prototype new features came up. Two major bottlenecks surfaced:

  1. Production Environments: Are inherently slower because we need multiple checks and balances to ensure what we ship is high quality (PRs, QA, etc).
  2. Communication Overhead: The hidden drag on our ability to move quickly.

While the production environment challenges are well understood, the impact of communication overhead is both more subtle and more profound. Let’s dive into why this is the case and what it means for growing a tech team.

The Cost of Communication

Imagine if a single agent were responsible for gathering information, making decisions, and executing across all company functions—from product and engineering to sales. Feedback from clients could be integrated into the product quickly and efficiently. However, as organizations grow, the following challenges arise:

  1. Fragmented Information:
  2. In larger organizations, no single person has complete context. Decisions often suffer because the full picture is split among many people.

  3. Translation Loss:
  4. When ideas are communicated between people, the nuances of the original mental model can be lost in translation. This misalignment may result in building the wrong thing, wasting time and effort.

  5. Slower Communication:
  6. The more layers you have between decision-makers and executors, the longer it takes for decisions to be communicated and implemented.

    Communication overhead of a hierarchical organization
    Communication overhead of a hierarchical organization

While growing the team may provide more raw output, it also introduces a communication cost that might cause the team to build the wrong product.

Focus the Product; Keep Teams Lean

An alternative approach to growing the team is to keep the feature set small and maintain a focused product. Rapid team growth can sometimes be a sign that the product’s core value isn’t clearly defined, leading to a “build everything” mentality. Instead:

  • Have Conviction in Your Product Identity:
  • Focus on nailing down the core value proposition first. Build and refine the product until it clearly stands out before adding extra features.

  • Grow Gradually:
  • As the product matures, pivots should decrease. As a result, communication overhead becomes less and you can scale the team.

Scaling the Team

Eventually, growth becomes necessary—there simply isn’t enough time in a day for a single person to build everything. When expanding your team, consider the following:

  • Team as a Single Unit:
  • Encourage team members to be generalists and promote extensive knowledge sharing. When every member is well-informed, the team can function almost as a single unit. A practical test is ensuring that every team member can take on on-call responsibilities.

  • Know When to Split:
  • Once the team reaches a size where universal knowledge sharing becomes impractical, it’s time to divide into smaller groups. The ideal split is one where communication needs are minimal between the new groups. Although factors like politics, access control, and time-zones can complicate this decision.

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Conclusion

Minimizing communication overhead by keeping teams lean, encouraging knowledge sharing, and carefully scaling can make a big difference. I might go as far to say that it is one of the advantages that startups have over large corporations.

Ultimately, it’s about having conviction in your product’s identity and ensuring that every additional team member adds value without slowing down the pace of innovation.