The Power of Working in Pairs

From Team Size to Team Structure

Picture this:
A perfectly sized team of seven engineers — great skills, good tools, clear mission.
Six months later, they’re behind schedule. Knowledge is siloed. New hires are slow to ramp. Quality issues keep surfacing late.

What went wrong?

In The Science of Team Size and Right-Sizing Your Teams, I explained why 5–9 person teams hit the sweet spot for balancing diversity of thought with manageable coordination. But here’s the truth:

Perfectly sized teams still fail if their structure is wrong.

The missing ingredient isn’t headcount. It’s how people connect, communicate, and collaborate day-to-day. And one of the simplest, most powerful structures I’ve seen work repeatedly is the pair.

When teams organize around pairs as their smallest building block, knowledge flows faster, quality rises naturally, and trust — the currency of high performance — is baked into the operating model.

Why Pairs Outperform Committees

A client once formed a committee of senior engineers to fix persistent system reliability issues. After several weeks and dozens of meetings, they had more plans — but no fixes.

When they switched to working in pairs, things changed. Within two weeks, the top three root causes were identified and resolved.

Why? Because a pair is the atomic unit of collaboration — small enough to move fast, big enough to benefit from different perspectives, and far less prone to the coordination drag that slows bigger groups.

In a healthy pair:

• Feedback is instant — no waiting for the next meeting to validate ideas.
• Accountability is built-in — no one wants to be the person holding the other back.
• Learning happens naturally — every discussion is a micro knowledge transfer.
• Cognitive load is shared — hard problems stop feeling overwhelming.
• Resilience emerges — when one is stuck, the other can unstick the work.

Cognitive science backs this up: working solo increases confirmation bias and accelerates mental fatigue. A pair naturally counters both.

Pairing Is Not Just for Developers

Pairing isn’t about code — it’s about how people think, learn, and share knowledge.

A study by Plonka et al. found that structured pairing significantly accelerates knowledge transfer in complex work, surfacing six natural teaching strategies pairs use without formal training. These principles apply in any knowledge-intensive environment.

Organizations that intentionally structure work around pairs consistently see:

• New hires ramp quickly — productive in days, not weeks.
• Issues surface early — caught before late-stage reviews.
• Knowledge lives in relationships — not just in individual minds.
• Engagement rises naturally — boosted by the social nature of pairing.

The most effective pattern: teams of 5–9 people, broken into rotating pairs that own specific domains but regularly switch partners to prevent new silos.

Pairing in Action: Cross-Industry Proof

Pairing works anywhere complex work happens:

• Executive Leadership – SAP’s co-CEO structure paired complementary strengths: McDermott’s sales expertise with Snabe’s product vision. Together they navigated a pivotal strategic shift with shared accountability.
• Product Management – A medical device company ran “pair discovery” sessions: one PM led customer interviews, the other synthesized insights live. Result: significantly faster time from insight to implementation.
• Design – A fintech startup paired UX researchers with visual designers end-to-end. Outcome: substantially higher post-launch satisfaction scores compared to their previous siloed approach.

In every case, pairing wasn’t a side practice — it was a structural choice baked into how work happened.

Strategic Pairing Patterns

When pairing “doesn’t work,” it’s often because the wrong pattern was used. Successful organizations pick pairing strategies that fit the goal:

• Mentor–Mentee – Accelerates onboarding and skill development.
  Example: New engineers paired with three different seniors in their first month saw ramp-up times cut substantially.
• Complementary Skills – Combines domain expertise with technical capability to tackle complex problems.
• T-Shaped Growth – Pairs specialists in different areas to expand each other’s range.
• Cross-Functional – Partners people from different functions to eliminate handoff delays and blind spots.

The secret: pairing is designed, not left to chance.

Pairing in the Remote Era

Some feared remote work would kill pairing. In many cases, it’s improved it.

One distributed engineering team replaced in-office pairing with “virtual pairing pods” — dedicated Slack channels, shared docs, and scheduled video sessions. Three months in, they found remote pairing outperformed their old approach for certain tasks because communication was explicit and documented.

Tools like Figma, Miro, Google Workspace, and collaborative IDEs make remote pairing fluid. The real success factors are human: clear communication habits, time zone awareness, and deliberate relationship building.

The Leadership Imperative

Pairing isn’t just a delivery tactic. It’s a strategic lever that shapes how your organization thinks, learns, and adapts.

If your teams are struggling with slow onboarding, persistent quality issues, or siloed knowledge, the problem might not be skills or tools — it might be structure.

Research supports these outcomes. For example, Williams et al. in IEEE Software found paired programmers produced code with 15% fewer defects while taking only 15% more time — a trade-off that more than pays for itself in reduced rework. And Jensen’s study¹ found defect rates in paired work “three orders of magnitude lower than the organization’s norm.”

Pairing creates resilience, spreads knowledge, and bakes trust into your operating model. It doesn’t slow work — it accelerates the right things: alignment, quality, and adaptability.

Great teams aren’t just well-staffed. They’re well-structured. And structure starts with pairs.

References

¹ Jensen, R. W. (1996). Management Impact on Software Cost and Schedule. As cited in Williams, L. & Kessler, R. (2002). Pair Programming Illuminated. Addison-Wesley Professional, p. 35.