Great article. I have found besides communication one of the other failures in larger teams is people stop questioning why are we doing “it” this way.
This can lead to hiring people to keep X running smoothly, fix it’s niggles etc when in fact you should have got rid of X and done something else. In large teams no one challenges the status quo.
I encountered a very extreme case of this where 17 developers were needed to make a web application/service operate as expected where all the development was not new features a customer would see but fixes, operations and incremental improvements on making the service operate at all.
A few changes later over a month or two, by zooming back to what we were actually trying to achieve for the customer, a bit of lean thinking, and only 1 person was needed to achieve significantly greater output customers could see than the team of 17.
The scary thing is this was changing 10 years of status quo, no one had challenged it in that long.
