How They Do It · An interactive essay
Why does work get slower as companies grow?
Companies hire more people because they want to do more.
Yet somewhere along the way, adding people starts making everything feel slower.
At four people, everyone can talk to everyone.
Communication is direct. Context lives in people’s heads. Decisions can happen in seconds.
Then the company grows.
Ten people. Still a small team. But watch the lines.
Headcount went from 4 to 10. Possible conversations went from 6 to 45.
Every new person can talk to everyone who is already there, so each hire adds more lines than the last one did.
possible conversations = n(n−1)/2
Try it.
10 people · 45 possible conversations. Hiring person 11 adds 10 more.
At 100 people, it is 4,950.
So we add structure.
Thirty people can’t all talk to each other. So we group them into teams, and the teams talk inside themselves.
That solves the first problem. Now the teams need to talk to each other.
1 of 6
Chat channels
So conversations have somewhere to live.
2 of 6
Weekly meetings
So everyone hears the same thing at the same time.
3 of 6
Team leads
So each team has someone who can speak for it.
4 of 6
Roadmaps
So everyone knows what is coming next.
5 of 6
Project trackers
So nothing falls through the cracks.
6 of 6
Approval steps
So mistakes get caught before they ship.
Structure solves one problem by creating new ones.
None of these decisions are obviously stupid. Most of them make sense locally.
Each one was added by someone solving a real problem. Nobody was in charge of the total.
Eventually, the system becomes the work.
People increasingly spend time communicating about work, coordinating work, tracking work and asking permission to do work.
Follow one person.
In this drawing, they are in five channels and three recurring meetings. Their team’s work passes five approvals before it ships.
None of that is the work they were hired to do.
You didn’t hire slow people. You built a slow system.
Ending
Growing companies do not automatically become slow.
But the operating system that worked at five people rarely works unchanged at fifty.
The question is not how to communicate more.
It is how to design a company that needs less coordination to move.
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