TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

If you’re working in a big group, you’re fighting human nature – (37signals)

I believe both Apple and Amazon (two companies I respect a lot for their version 1.0s) talk about “two-pizza teams” — that is, keeping the team small enough that it can be fed with two pizzas…If the company that made the iPod believes in a two-pizza team, how can you justify putting 90 people in the room? 

In university, “group projects,” when group size and members are defined by the professor, tend to be defined by a few members, while the rest end up being dead weight. Rather than just be productive, those core members are forced to give roles to the other members that are either minimal in their impact on the project, or face the specter of those useless workers doing a poor job on part of the project.

I see work teams much the same way, and I think 37Signals’ little article underlies this quite nicely — big groups do not enjoy the sum of the group’s intelligence. They are slowed down an innovation and creative thought is stifled, all because the dead-weighters must be included in some way and made to feel like they’re contributing to the project — when they’re actually making it worse. 

2 or 3 dedicated and motivated students is a good size for most school projects, I think, in the same sense that 10 is good for larger business projects. There is simply not enough people to create bullshit roles when you only have a few people to work with — everyone must contribute something substantial to the group.

I like relaxing and being lazy as much as any other college student, but I am growing increasingly convinced that taking responsibility for a large portion of a project’s workload is a good thing. It forces you to 1. work hard and not waste any time, 2. to conceptualize and lay out your work so it logically makes sense (which is also why only one person should be responsible for putting together a paper or presentation), and 3. it makes you take responsibility for the project — there’s no screwing around when you’re responsible for at least a third or a half of the project.