Right-Sizing Your Teams: How to Fix Size Problems

When Team Size Goes Wrong

Meet Alex, a technology director at a growing fintech. After securing a major client, leadership doubled her team overnight. Six months later, with twice the people, they were delivering 30% slower than before.

Meanwhile, across town, Jamie leads a small startup engineering team of three. They’re fast and nimble—until one person gets sick, another goes on vacation, and suddenly there’s no one who understands the payment integration code.

In The Science of Team Size, we explored why the 7±2 range consistently outperforms both extremes. But knowing the ideal is only half the battle.

This post tackles the practical challenge: how do you actually right-size teams that have grown too large, remained too small, or don’t have enough meaningful work to do? We’ll cover the entire process—from spotting problems to implementing solutions—without losing momentum or culture.

Spot the Red Flags

Before you can fix team size problems, you need to recognize them. Here are the telltale signs your teams might be outside the optimal range.

Signs Your Team Is Too Big

• 🗓 The Calendar Test: More than 20% of work time spent in internal coordination meetings “We spend more time talking about work than doing it.”

• ❓ The Knowledge Gap: Team members struggle to accurately describe what others are working on “I’m not sure who’s handling the payment integration—maybe check with Sarah?”

• 🐌 The Decision Delay: Simple decisions that should take hours now take days or weeks “We need another meeting with the entire team before we can decide.”

• 🤷 The Ownership Vacuum: “Who’s responsible for this?” becomes a frequent question “I thought you were handling that part of the project?”

• 📦 The Subgroup Formation: Unofficial teams-within-teams start to form “Let’s just have the frontend people make this decision without involving everyone.”

Signs Your Team Is Too Small

• 😩 The Burnout Signal: Team members regularly work evenings or weekends just to keep up “I’ll finish this over the weekend so we don’t miss the deadline.”

• 🚑 The Single Point of Failure: One person’s sick day derails the entire delivery plan “We can’t deploy today because Raj is out sick and he’s the only one who knows how.”

• 🧠 The Skill Gap: Critical work stalls because specialized knowledge is missing “We need to wait until next quarter when we can hire someone who knows ML.”

• ⚡ The Innovation Drought: No time for improvements or exploring better approaches “We know there’s technical debt, but we can’t spare anyone to fix it.”

• 🎯 The Context-Switching Tax: People juggle too many different types of work “I’m the backend developer, DevOps engineer, and database admin all at once.”

Signs Your Team Lacks Sufficient Work

• 🕰️ Low Utilization: Team members frequently report having nothing to do or are visibly idle “I’ve been waiting for new tasks for three days now.”

• 🧩 Artificial Work Creation: Tasks are being invented just to keep people busy “Let’s refactor this again even though we just did it last month.”

• ✨ Excessive Gold-Plating: Simple features receive unnecessary complexity or polish “I added five more animation options that nobody asked for.”

• 🏆 Competing for Work: Team members vie for the limited meaningful tasks available “Can I take that ticket? I really need something substantial to work on.”

• 😴 Declining Engagement: Boredom and lack of purpose lead to disengagement “I don’t even bother suggesting ideas anymore since there’s nothing to implement.”

Reality Check: Most teams don’t experience all these symptoms at once. Even 2-3 consistent red flags warrant attention.

Playbook for Oversized Teams

When your team has grown beyond the optimal range, splitting it effectively requires careful planning. Here’s a structured approach that minimizes disruption while maximizing the benefits of right-sizing.

1. Map the Work

Before making any changes, thoroughly understand what your team actually does—not just what they’re supposed to do on paper.

• Create a comprehensive work inventory listing all responsibilities, projects, services, and products the team maintains

• Identify natural groupings by domain (user authentication, reporting), customer segment (enterprise, SMB), or technical boundaries (frontend, data pipeline)

• Quantify the effort required for each work area to ensure balanced distribution

• Look for natural seams where responsibilities could be cleanly divided with minimal handoffs

2. Analyze Dependencies

Understanding how work interconnects helps prevent creating new silos or communication bottlenecks.

• Create a dependency map showing which work areas frequently need coordination

• Identify tightly coupled areas that should remain together in the same team

• Spot shared services or components that might benefit from dedicated ownership

• Measure communication patterns using tools like calendar analysis or collaboration metrics

Pro Tip: Use a collaborative tool like Miro or Figma for this exercise with the entire team. The people doing the work often see natural divisions that managers miss.

3. Prepare for Expansion

With a clear understanding of the work and its dependencies, you can now design optimal team structures.

• Target 5-9 people per team to stay within the cognitive and coordination sweet spot

• Ensure each team has a complete skill mix needed for their domain (or a clear plan to develop it)

• Balance on-call responsibilities and operational load across teams

• Define clear interfaces between teams where handoffs will be necessary

• Consider career growth opportunities in each new team to prevent perception of “A and B teams”

4. Define Interfaces

Clear boundaries and communication protocols prevent the new structure from creating more problems than it solves.

• Document team boundaries with RACI matrices or service-level agreements

• Establish lightweight coordination mechanisms like weekly sync meetings, shared Slack channels, or cross-team standups

• Create explicit escalation paths for dependencies, blockers, and emergencies

• Design shared processes for work that crosses team boundaries

• Agree on common tooling and standards to maintain consistency across teams

5. Reinforce the New Structure

Test your new structure before fully committing to minimize risk and allow for adjustments.

• Start with one team split rather than reorganizing everything at once

• Set clear success metrics that align with the problems you’re trying to solve (e.g., faster decisions, reduced meeting load)

• Run the pilot for 4–6 weeks with weekly retrospectives to identify and address issues

• Maintain a feedback channel for team members to report friction points

• Document lessons learned to apply to future team splits

6. Measure Success

Track key metrics to ensure your approach is working.

• Decision velocity: How quickly can the team make and implement decisions? Look for 20-30% improvement.

• Meeting load: Total time spent in internal coordination meetings should decrease to less than 15% of work time.

• Delivery predictability: Teams should be able to more accurately forecast and meet their commitments.

• Team satisfaction: Use pulse surveys to track engagement and satisfaction with the new structure.

• Defect rate: Monitor quality metrics to ensure the split hasn’t negatively impacted output quality.

• Knowledge sharing: Track how effectively information flows within and between the new teams.

Hypothetical Scenario: Imagine a mid-sized financial institution that splits their 18-person platform team into three focused teams of 6 people each. Within two months, they could reasonably expect to see a significant reduction in coordination meetings and an increase in feature delivery speed as each team gains autonomy and clarity of purpose.

Playbook for Undersized Teams

When your team is too small to sustainably deliver on its responsibilities, strategic growth is essential. Here’s how to expand your team without losing the agility and culture that makes small teams effective.

1. Find the Breaking Points

Before adding people, understand exactly where and why your team is struggling.

• Conduct a skills inventory to identify critical gaps and single points of failure

• Track overtime patterns to spot unsustainable workloads and burnout risks

• Map knowledge silos where only one person understands critical systems

• Analyze delivery delays to identify where capacity constraints are impacting outcomes

• Measure context-switching to quantify the impact of team members juggling too many responsibilities

Warning Sign: If team members can’t take vacation without disrupting delivery, your team is definitely too small.

2. Optimize Before Hiring

Adding people should never be your first solution. First, maximize the capacity of your existing team.

• Automate repetitive work like deployments, testing, and reporting to free up capacity

• Eliminate low-value tasks that don’t directly contribute to key outcomes

• Simplify processes to reduce unnecessary steps and approvals

• Use fractional resources for specialized skills needed only occasionally

• Leverage managed services instead of building and maintaining everything in-house

Pro Tip: Before adding headcount, look for automation opportunities in your deployment pipeline and test suite. Teams that invest in automation often discover they can delay hiring for several months while simultaneously freeing up 15-20% more capacity for feature development and improving overall system reliability.

3. Grow Strategically

When it’s time to add people, be deliberate about who you bring in and why.

• Prioritize T-shaped people with both deep expertise in a critical area and broad capabilities across adjacent domains

• Complement existing strengths rather than duplicating skills you already have

• Consider team dynamics and culture fit to maintain the cohesion that makes small teams effective

• Value adaptability over narrow specialization for maximum flexibility

• Hire for learning capacity so team members can grow into new areas as needs evolve

Pro Tip: When growing from 3-4 people to 5-7, consider bringing in a more senior person who can help establish scalable practices while contributing immediately.

4. Protect Culture During Growth

Team expansion often disrupts the culture and working agreements that made the small team successful.

• Document implicit agreements and practices before adding new people

• Create a deliberate onboarding process that transfers both technical knowledge and cultural context

• Establish pairing/mentoring relationships to accelerate knowledge sharing

• Schedule regular culture check-ins after adding new members to address friction points

• Revisit decision-making processes to ensure they scale appropriately with the larger team

Best Practice: When growing your team from 4 to 7 people, dedicate one day per week to knowledge sharing and pairing for the first two months after expansion. This structured approach helps maintain team velocity while ensuring new members quickly absorb both technical knowledge and cultural context.

Playbook for Teams with Insufficient Work

Sometimes the problem isn’t that a team is too big or too small for its workload, but that there simply isn’t enough meaningful work for the current team size. This scenario requires a different approach.

1. Assess the Situation

Before making changes, understand the nature and duration of the work shortage.

• Quantify the capacity gap between available team hours and actual work requirements

• Determine if the shortage is temporary or permanent by analyzing upcoming roadmaps and business forecasts

• Identify underutilized skills that might be valuable elsewhere in the organization

• Evaluate the strategic importance of maintaining the team’s capabilities long-term

• Calculate the cost of inaction in terms of disengagement, attrition, and wasted salary

2. Expand the Team’s Scope

Often the best first approach is finding additional valuable work for the team.

• Identify adjacent problem spaces where the team’s skills could add value

• Take on technical debt reduction that’s been deferred

• Develop platform capabilities that will benefit future work

• Create learning initiatives to build new skills for upcoming needs

• Explore innovation projects with potential business impact

Pro Tip: Create a “capabilities catalog” that showcases your team’s skills to other parts of the organization. This increases visibility and often surfaces work opportunities that other leaders didn’t realize your team could handle.

3. Temporarily Redistribute Team Members

When expanding scope isn’t sufficient, consider strategic redistribution.

• Loan team members to other teams with high demand

• Create rotation programs for cross-training and skill development

• Form tiger teams for short-term strategic initiatives

• Establish internal consulting where team members help other teams

• Create mentorship pairings with newer teams that could benefit from expertise

4. Right-Size if Necessary

When the work reduction is permanent, responsible downsizing may be necessary.

• Be transparent about the workload reality

• Consider team consolidation if the work reduction is permanent

• Create transition plans for team members who may need to move

• Preserve key capabilities even while reducing overall size

• Provide career development support for affected team members

5. Measure Effectiveness

Track key metrics to ensure your approach is working.

• Team engagement scores should stabilize or improve

• Skill utilization rate should increase toward optimal levels

• Value delivery should remain consistent or increase

• Knowledge transfer should show measurable progress

• Retention of key talent should remain high despite changes

Hypothetical Scenario: Consider a 12-person infrastructure team that has just completed a major platform migration and now finds themselves with reduced workload. Recognizing this violates optimal team sizing principles, leadership could split them into two focused teams of 6 people each. One team would maintain core platform services while the other conducts a 3-month “innovation sprint” with rotations through other teams. This approach would facilitate knowledge transfer across the organization and potentially identify new high-value initiatives that could justify maintaining both teams with their more focused missions.

Use this decision framework to determine the best approach:

Pro Tip: Always be honest with the team about workload realities. People generally prefer meaningful work elsewhere over pretending to be busy in their current role.

Overcoming Resistance

Team size changes often face resistance from both leadership and team members. Here’s how to address the most common objections with evidence and practical solutions.

”Our work is too interconnected to split the team.”

This is often the first objection to splitting larger teams, but it’s rarely insurmountable.

• Identify natural seams in the work that may not be immediately obvious

• Create temporary liaison roles to maintain coordination during the transition

• Apply the two-pizza rule as a forcing function (if two american sized pizzas can’t feed your team, it’s too big)

• Start with logical ownership boundaries in code or services before formal team changes

• Share success stories from similar organizations that successfully split interconnected teams

Practical Example: A payment processing team that insisted their work was “too interconnected” successfully split by first establishing clear service boundaries with defined APIs between components, then gradually moving to separate teams that owned each service.

”Adding people will slow us down.”

The fear that growing a team will reduce productivity is valid but can be mitigated.

• Hire specifically for identified pain points rather than general capacity

• Stagger additions to allow for proper onboarding (one person at a time, 4-6 weeks apart)

• Temporarily reduce velocity expectations to account for onboarding and knowledge transfer

• Create a structured onboarding plan before hiring to minimize disruption

• Measure the long-term productivity gains against short-term onboarding costs

”Our small team is fine as it is.”

Small teams often resist growth due to concerns about culture and agility.

• Frame right-sizing as risk management rather than just capacity expansion

• Start with part-time or rotational roles from other teams to gradually increase capacity

• Quantify the “bus factor” risks of having critical knowledge in too few people

• Document the hidden costs of the current team size (missed opportunities, technical debt)

• Pilot temporary expansions during high-demand periods to demonstrate the benefits

Practical Example: Consider a small data engineering team with only one machine learning specialist. When 40% of the roadmap depends on ML expertise, this creates a significant bottleneck. Adding a second specialist with complementary ML skills can unblock multiple revenue-generating initiatives simultaneously.

”We don’t have budget for more people.”

Resource constraints are real, but there are creative approaches to right-sizing.

• Eliminate low-value work first to free up capacity without adding headcount

• Explore internal transfers or rotations from other teams with excess capacity

• Calculate and present the ROI of reduced burnout, lower turnover, and fewer delays

• Consider contractors or part-time roles for specialized skills or peak periods

• Implement a phased growth plan tied to specific business outcomes and metrics

”Splitting the team will create silos.”

Concerns about knowledge sharing and collaboration across new team boundaries are valid.

• Establish explicit cross-team collaboration mechanisms from day one

• Create shared documentation and knowledge repositories accessible to all teams

• Implement regular cross-team demos and knowledge sharing sessions

• Rotate people between teams for short periods to maintain broader context

• Measure and incentivize cross-team collaboration to prevent isolation

Measuring Success

To validate that your team size changes are delivering the expected benefits, establish clear metrics and track them consistently before, during, and after the transition.

Key Metrics to Track

Track these before and after metrics to quantify the impact of your team size changes:

Measurement Best Practices

• Establish baselines before making any team size changes

• Use both quantitative and qualitative measures to get a complete picture

• Create visual dashboards to make metrics visible and help teams self-correct

• Schedule regular review cycles to assess progress and make adjustments

• Involve the team in metric selection to ensure buy-in and relevance

Pro Tip: Don’t just measure team size in isolation. Track how it correlates with business outcomes like time-to-market, customer satisfaction, and revenue impact to demonstrate the strategic value of right-sizing.

When to Adjust Your Approach

Not every team size change delivers the expected benefits immediately. Be prepared to iterate based on what the metrics tell you:

• If decision velocity doesn’t improve after splitting a team, you may need to clarify decision rights and ownership

• If knowledge silos persist after growing a small team, implement more structured knowledge sharing practices

• If collaboration friction increases after a split, strengthen cross-team coordination mechanisms

• If team satisfaction decreases, address underlying cultural or process issues that may have been exposed

Action Plan

Implementing team size changes requires a methodical approach. Here’s a step-by-step action plan you can follow to right-size your teams effectively:

1. Audit Your Current State

• Map all teams and their current sizes across your organization

• Identify teams showing red flags of being too large or too small

• Prioritize teams to address based on business impact and severity of symptoms

• Document the specific problems each team is experiencing (don’t just assume size is the issue)

2. Establish Baselines

• Select relevant metrics for each team based on their specific challenges

• Collect baseline data for at least 2-4 weeks before making changes

• Document current processes and team structures for comparison

• Gather qualitative feedback from team members about current pain points

3. Design and Pilot Changes

• Create a detailed implementation plan for each team size change

• Start with one high-impact team rather than changing everything at once

• Set clear success criteria aligned with the specific problems you’re solving

• Communicate transparently about the reasons for changes and expected benefits

• Run the pilot for 4-6 weeks with regular check-ins and adjustments

4. Measure and Refine

• Compare post-change metrics against your baseline

• Collect feedback from team members about the impact of changes

• Identify unexpected consequences or new challenges that emerged

• Make necessary adjustments to your approach based on what you’ve learned

5. Scale Successful Patterns

• Document what worked and create playbooks for future team size changes

• Apply lessons learned to the next set of teams

• Establish ongoing monitoring to catch team size issues early

• Create a culture where teams feel empowered to raise size-related concerns

Remember: Team size is just one factor in team effectiveness. Always consider it in the context of your specific work, culture, and business goals.