Blog

In any company communication overhead increases proportionally the square of the number of people on the team.

In layman’s terms, this simply means that as your team gets bigger you spend more and more time coordinating activities, and while the team size grows linearly, the coordination costs grow exponentially.

However,  in the strictest sense, these coordination costs don’t add any customer value.  

In fact, if the coordination costs get bad enough, they can actually subtract customer value.  This is a major reason why small teams often outperform large teams and why huge companies reach a point where they seem oblivious to the customer.  (It's also a major argument against big government, but that's another topic).

As our team has grown, I've become more aware of these coordination costs and implemented various strategies to minimize the problem.

 

My main strategy is to constantly ask, "Would the client pay me for this?"

 

For example, if I'm coding and adding features to our product, and I pretend I was building our product for an external client, the answer to "would the client pay me me for this?" is obviously yes.  Coding features obviously adds direct value to the product.

 

But what about meetings?

 

If I went to a client and said, "I'm billing you for 10 hours this week because our team met and needed to talk about stuff", I think I'd have a pretty upset client.  Why should the client have to pay for the general overhead of running our company?

 

But meetings aren't created equal.

 

What if the meeting was attended by myself, a designer and a lead developer?  And we were sketching out the UI of the product on a whiteboard?  And the output of that meeting becomes the input to the next step in building a new feature?  That meeting adds direct value to the product.  And the answer to "Would the client pay me for this?" is an enthusiastic yes.

 

This strategy has clarified to me a lot of the confusion about meetings.  Lots of people say "meetings are a waste of time."  But others think they're valuable.  Both camps are correct.  Most meetings are a waste of time, but some meetings are extremely valuable. 

 

So anytime I'm looking at a planned meeting, or sitting in a meeting I ask myself, "Would the client pay me for this?"  And, if the answer is "no", I make a change and either cancel the meeting, or change the agenda, or, if absolutely necessary to have a "useless" meeting, keep it to the absolute minimum time required. 

 

Try asking "Would the client pay me for this?" in your own work.  You'll be pleasantly surprised at how quickly it clarifies what activities you should be focusing upon.