Everyone says small teams move faster.
That’s only half true.
Small helps. But small is not what makes a team fast. Independent is.
A team of three that depends on other teams is slow. It doesn’t matter how good the three people are. They need a designer from somewhere else. A review from someone who is busy. An API from a team with a different roadmap. A decision from someone who is in meetings all day.
So the work sits. Nobody is lazy. Everybody is waiting.
That’s what we miss when we count heads. We look at how many people are working. We should look at how much of the time the work is actually moving.
Every dependency is a queue. One handoff costs you a day. Three handoffs cost you two weeks, because everyone has their own priorities, and by the time your thing reaches them, the context is gone.
Put two small teams side by side. One has dependencies. The other is a group of ICs who own their work from start to finish.
Same size. Same talent. Completely different speed.
This is where AI actually helps.
First, it keeps the team small. Work that used to need another hire now needs one person with the right tools.
Second, and more important, it breaks dependencies. The PM doesn’t wait for an analyst to pull the numbers. The designer builds a working prototype without waiting for a sprint. The operator builds the small internal tool nobody had time for.
None of that is perfect. It doesn’t need to be. It just needs to stop sitting in someone else’s queue.
Most people use AI to do the same work a bit faster. That’s the small win. The big win is removing the handoff altogether.
So before you hire, or reorganize, ask a different question. Not “how small can this team be?” but “what does this team have to wait for?”
Then remove it.
Create independent ICs. Create independent teams. Give them the ownership and the tools to go from idea to shipped without asking anyone.
Then watch what happens to velocity.
