# Why small teams win on engineering velocity - **Episode:** [189](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/189.md) (2025-04-17) - **Type:** interview - **Tags:** engineering-velocity, product-strategy, small-teams - **Time:** 8:29–13:25 (start 509s) - **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/189?t=509](https://truthliesandwork.com/189?t=509) --- [8:29] James Hawkins: I'd say there are 2 things that led to this decision. The overarching theme was our product strategy is to build every single piece of software that a software team needs, which means like a ton of stuff. And so like, okay, what are we? And we asked ourselves kind of first, before we structured the company, we were asking ourselves about product strategy. Like what, well, what are we trying to build? Like we're going to basically, I'm a huge believer in your kind of ship the org structure. And so it's like, well, okay, what are we trying to ship here? Okay, we're trying to ship potentially 100 products at some stage or another. And kind of like what AWS is to infrastructure, we're kind of like that to software. And so what are we winning on? Are we winning on kind of, do we want an org that's designed around kind of control and design and polish? Or do we want an org that's geared around kind of velocity? And there is kind of a trade-off, I think, between the two [9:15] Leanne Elliott: Yeah [9:16] James Hawkins: And we concluded, like, we're not going to win on design polish here. We're going to win on engineering velocity. So The entire company is designed to ship quickly. Okay, well, who has the greatest engineering velocity? Like, where can we look for examples of particularly productive organizations per person? And it just felt obvious that startups will ship the most per person, where there's like 1 or 2 people will build an entire thing [9:38] midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge): Yeah [9:40] James Hawkins: And then Y Combinator has like, I think in our batch, there's probably like 250 startups. So probably in total about 500 people. that will ship, um, probably like 800 or 900 products. Because a lot of people will build one product, it will fail, they'll build something else. It'd be like, wow, that is like a ton of products. Whereas there are big companies that would take that many people to ship one product. Obviously it has to scale more and so on. And we're like, okay, what is it like being a YC company? And basically you have complete freedom. Like you live in your own apartment together. You just build whatever you want. Um, and then kind of every week or every 2 weeks or so you have office hours with, uh, one of the YC partners. And the YC partner is kind of like your You know, spiritual guru kind of, uh, coach who can pattern match across the other couple of hundred startups or thousands of startups they've dealt with. And so they can kind of just help steer the ship a little bit if you're going wrong. So you show up being like, oh, no one's paying for my thing. What should we do? Like, should we pivot? Should we keep going? And they can help you with these big directional kind of decisions, but they're not going to tell you like what to build at all. Sometimes it's just encouragement, like, hey, this sounds great, just keep going. Other times it's like, hmm, sounds like no one cares about your thing and you're screwed. And so we kind of, we're like, well, how can we build an org that feels like that? It's also super motivating to work in that kind of environment because it's a really high ownership. And so we wanted to create, we felt PostHog like a series of small startups, essentially each with their own metrics and tracking and all this stuff. we think would feel very similar to work in. So we'll probably be more productive and there's like no committees, no meetings or whatever. And then the other example we had was, I went to a talk by Jeff Lawson who runs Twilio. He's ex-Amazon and he opened the talk with, I think that Amazon's greatest innovation is small teams. And he talked about, it's kind of run like lots of startups. And I was like, oh, I can also see a really good example there. If I look at like You know, we're a developer product. AWS is like an $80 billion run rate business, and it's hundreds of small teams. So we could see an example at extreme scale in one company pulling this off, which was kind of enough for us. So that was kind of the reasoning and then the inspiration for it [11:52] Al Elliott: So we have the advantages of small teams give you the advantage of engineering velocity, engineering velocity, I think you said. Um, a lot more ownership over the product, but it sounds like the trade-off is that A, you don't get, as the owner, as a company, you don't get control over what gets shipped necessarily. And B, it might not be perfect if I understood it right [12:15] James Hawkins: Yeah, absolutely. Um, but it can also mean not having ownership can be a good thing if your team are smarter than you. Um, so I would also argue that, um, I'm 100% certain our company would not be as successful had I been able to control everything anyway. Because our, some, like I would say our most impactful ever idea was going from one product to 2 products. And that came from an individual developer having the freedom to just build what he wanted. If you have a genuinely really strong team that can cope with lots of autonomy, and there are loads of implications for kind of how you hire and the kind of people that will succeed in this environment. I think it's actually given us a— we've gone from like a series of local maxima as a business. Like we've been at the top of a curve that seems pretty good. Like we're making some money in the early days compared to no money at all. But we've changed strategy multiple times because of this, because it's created a lot of chaos. And our strategy has been us kind of labeling what's good in the chaos that can unfold when you have lots of people working quite independently of each other. I could go on for ages about this. Like, for example, uh, like if you read about— yeah, I was reading a book on how do empires rise and fall