Aza Raskin is the founder of Humanized, the son of Macintosh inventor, Jef Raskin, and an all-around good guy.  A few months ago, Aza Raskin agreed to answer several readers’ questions.   In today’s post, Aza Raskin tackles a reader’s question about Product Management, cooperations with other groups, throwing stuff over the fence, why large teams generally suck, and political in-fighting and politics.

I work as a product manager for a technology company in the valley.  In large companies like mine, the department of Product Management, Software Engineering, and Customer Experience work together, but in a clunky way, to build a product.  What is the best way, in your opinion, to infuse the Humane Design Principles in a hot political environment?

Maybe you should start an "Ask Aza" column, like a Dr. Phil segment, or something.

Successfully bringing a product to market is a holistic endeavor.  User requirements drives customer experience; customer experience drives marketing; marketing drives user requirements.  Nobody should feel that a set of requirements has been "thrown over the fence".  When this happens, the recipient-of-the-throw is beholden to an abstract deliverable and is no longer connected to the end-user.  That’s a real problem.  Combating this requires a tight-feedback loop which is most easily created with a small team: engineering gets to see the market research come in, and the usability people can guide engineering throughout the actual creation process.

In an ideal world, everyone on the team would have a foot in engineering, design, and marketing.  Unfortunately, this isn’t always possible.  What is possible is that we can create small, tight teams that collectively have intimate knowledge of all three disciplines.

The small-team idea is by no means new.  In the book In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters explains over-and-over again that it’s the small groups; skunk works, home-brew projects, and strike teams that drive innovation at companies both large and small.  The most successful teams are those of 10 people or less — preferably between 4 and 8 — that include people from the required disciplines.

By keeping teams small, products don’t get commitee-ized.  The team is directly responsible for success.  Success is dependent on making a product that meets the needs of the user and to the user, the interface is the product.

P.S.,  I like the idea of an "Ask Aza" column: Anything that’s alliterative must be good!

Aza’s point above about team size is important, and one that I’ve discussed before.  Quantitatively, we can show why, in general, large teams aren’t the best way to go.  Here is what I wrote back in Ocotober 15, 2006:

Stinky Large Teams: A Proof

I’ve written about the importance of team size before, here, here, and here. Previously, this is what I said:

I’ve written about efficient teams before here and here. At Amazon, there is a concept of a 2-pizza team: no team should be larger than 2 pizzas can feed. It’s a great approach to team size. In my short career, I’ve learned how true that rule is. Here’s another thing I’ve learned –

• 2 people are smarter than one
• 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 people are smarter than 2
• a team larger than 9 people is just one big dumb blob

Ok, that’s not true at a wholesale level, but it sure feels like it. A small team with highly smart and capable team members can do much more than 10 mediocre team members.  The Wisdom of Crowds mentality doesn’t work that well when it comes to efficiency in teams — especially software teams.

A more quantitative explanation is as follows:

One of the root causes of failure in projects is communication — either a lack thereof, or miscommunication.  Large teams are inherently vehicles for bad communication.  This is basic combinatorics — for a given project, suppose there are persons A and B. In this scenario there is only 1 communication link. Add person C, now we have 3 communication links, A-B, B-C, C-A. Add person D, then we have 6; Add person E, then we have 10 communication links. Inductively, as team size grows, the raw combinatoric communication link counts grows geometrically, not linearly. To demonstrate this, we use basic statistics of the form n-choose-r, where !, such as n!, is equivalent to n factorial, to arrive at the formula for how many pairs we can choose from n items:

For the number of pairs, we can reduce the above formula to the following:

Visually, as team size grows, the communication links grows non-linearly, but exponentially:

A Rejoinder

Do not let the above dissuade you from large teams; if the product requires a large team, then that is what is needed. Caution, is what I am arguing here. The facts are that the larger the team, the more communication channels there are and the entire process then becomes more error-prone. If the product requires a large team, then expect the above challenge and manage it.

A Conclusion

There is wisdom in Bezos’ notion of the 2-Pizza Team.  Small teams work incredibly well.  Also, there is wisdom in Toyota’s usage of “The Big Room” as a way to mitigate defects caused by large teams.  A combining of the two will most likely make for a great team and a successful product.

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Other articles in the "Ask Aza Raskin" Series:

1. Ask Aza Raskin
2. Aza Raskin on Poka-Yoke & The Humane Interface
3. Aza Raskin on Quasimodal Design and The ATM
4. Aza on Feature-Bloat and Site Clutter
5. Aza on Google Search Results Page
6. Aza on Cooperation and Team Size

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Articles on Queueing Theory

• Queueing Theory: Part 1
• Queueing Theory: Part 2
• Queueing Theory: Part 3
• Queueing Theory: Part 4
• What is Waste?
• On Time-Traps and Waste
• Call Centers as Queueing Systems
• Travel Time & Waste
• Little’s Law for Product Development
• YouTube’s Queueing Properties
• Psychology of Queueing and Disneyland
• Queueing, Disneyland, and FastPass
• Multi-Tasking Leads to Lower Productivity
• Queueing Theory and Terrorism
• On Queueing Theory and Elevator Mirrors
• Queueing Psychology at the Gas Pump
• Psychology of Queueing, Haunted Houses, and Halloween
• The Variability Tree

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For articles on Operations, lean and six sigma, please visit the links below:

• The Gemba is the Dojo

• Managing Constraints Under Peak Volumes

• Order Pipeline of Events

• On Game Theory

• Series on Queueing Theory

• Applied Regression Analysis

• 5S

• Click-to-Ship Processes

• Kanban Sizing and "Pull"

• Lean at Krispy Kreme

• Theory of Constraints and Camping

• Lean for Software Development

• Don’t Waste the Customer’s Time

• Featuritis and the Focus on the Customer