Should unproven internal ideas be staffed with many people or a small number of opinionated ones?

Brian Balfour · Aug 16, 2023

Over-resourcing new internal bets is the single biggest thing that kills them; the right structure is a couple of generalists, separated and protected from the rest of the company, with guardrails and checkpoints

More people means more voices in the room and slower iteration; more people and more money do not help you find things faster — Reforge made this mistake and he had to kill and reset a product bet with a handpicked team of three

29:24 20Growth: Why Product-Market Fit is Not Enough, Revenue Does Not Create Usage, Metrics Must Be Before Strategy, Why it is Always Better to Concentrate than Diversify Marketing Channels and Secrets from Hubspot's Growth Engine with Brian Balfour @ Reforge

Varun Mohan · Jun 2, 2025

The conventional wisdom that more engineers means more success is wrong; unproven ideas should be staffed with only three or four opinionated people.

With ten people on an unproven idea everyone has opinions and nobody can be shown wrong, so alignment and communication break down; a small opinionated group can actually prove the idea out.

Scope: applies to ideas that have not yet been proven out

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Cem Kansu · Jun 20, 2025 · hedged

The chess course shipped with far fewer people and in far less time than Duolingo's math and music courses because of two unlocks: AI coding enabling fast prototyping/iteration, and staffing a small team of great people who already know the company's standards

AI prototyping removes the slow loop of an engineering team building prototypes, and great PMs/designers who know how Duolingo works can make quick decisions independently

Scope: based on Duolingo's own comparison with the math and music course launches

13:10 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo

Cem Kansu · Jun 20, 2025

Product teams will shrink from the traditional 5-15 person cross-functional team because fewer people are needed for tasks like prototyping and design exploration, which should let companies place many more innovative bets

Tasks like building a prototype or figuring out the right design no longer require as many people; if you can do the chess-style launch 10x more often, the product gets 10x better over time

14:04 Ai enabled small teams let companies place many more parallel bets