Size REALLY Matters: Finding the Squad Size Sweet Spot
When it comes to creating a great product roadmap, squad size is not just a logistical detail — it’s a critical factor that can make or break your delivery capabilities.
Too small, and you create dangerous dependencies on individuals. Too large, and you lose cohesion and accountability.
“We’ll have Pete work on this task first, then when he’s done he can pick up that other item.” Sound familiar? This kind of individual-level planning creates a house of cards that collapses at the first sign of illness, vacation, or unexpected complexity.
Meanwhile, experience shows that mammoth teams of 8+ developers will end up working on a variety of disparate tasks (regardless of what the plan says), making it virtually impossible to track who is responsible for what outcome.
Finding the optimal squad size for planning isn’t just about team composition—it’s about creating the fundamental conditions for predictable delivery, meaningful accountability, and sustainable team performance. In this article, we’ll explore why individual planning creates fragility, why massive teams dilute focus, and how to find the Goldilocks zone where planning actually works.
The Individual Planning Trap
Individual-level planning is the most common—and perhaps the most dangerous—planning antipattern seen in product development. It happens when planning discussions revolve around what specific people will do: “Pete will implement the authentication service, then move on to the API endpoints, while Sarah will handle the frontend components.”
This approach creates several critical vulnerabilities:
- Single points of failure: When plans depend on specific individuals, one person’s absence can derail the entire plan. Illness, vacation, family emergencies, or job changes become existential threats to delivery.
- Knowledge silos: Individual planning encourages specialization and discourages knowledge sharing. Over time, this creates information islands where only one person understands critical components.
- Sequential bottlenecks: Task sequences that depend on individual handoffs create cascading delays when any single task takes longer than expected.
- Estimation pressure: Individuals feel tremendous pressure to deliver precisely on their estimates, leading to sandbagging, stress, and burnout.
- Resource optimization theater: Leaders feel falsely productive by optimizing individual calendars to 100% utilization, but create fragile plans that can’t absorb variability.
I’ve had many, many examples where I’ve inherited organisations that supposedly rely on a single specialist developer. Not once, has that critical dependency actually existed anywhere except in the management team’s heads… and often in the head of that developer who works tirelessly to ensure that nobody else can get close to the code. Managers carefully avoid upsetting the person because they are so critical and yet, two weeks’ after the person has left, it’s business as usual and the squad is happily picking up the supposedly untouchable code.
The Oversized Squad Problem
At the other extreme, oversized squads (typically 6-8+ developers) create their own set of planning challenges:
- Diffusion of responsibility: When too many people are involved, clear ownership becomes elusive. The infamous “someone else will handle it” syndrome becomes prevalent.
- Communication overhead: The number of communication channels grows quadratically with team size. A team of 8 has 28 potential one-to-one communication channels to maintain.
- Planning complexity: Coordinating the work of 8+ developers requires increasingly sophisticated planning mechanisms that often collapse under their own weight.
- Cohesion loss: Larger teams struggle to maintain a unified direction and often splinter into subgroups with diverging priorities.
- Visibility challenges: It becomes difficult for leaders to maintain visibility into what each team member is working on and how it connects to broader initiatives.
I worked at a major commodity trading platform with this exact problem. To “accelerate” a massive refactoring, they created a “super squad” of 12 developers. Despite having significant talent on the team, the initiative floundered. Daily standups became 45-minute status meetings. No one had clear ownership of interconnected components. The team produced lots of code but struggled to integrate it cohesively. After three months of disappointing progress, we reorganized into three focused squads with clear boundaries and saw immediate improvements in velocity and quality.
Finding the Sweet Spot: The Optimal Squad Size
Research and practical experience point to a “sweet spot” for squad size that enables effective planning while maintaining resilience. Amazon’s “two-pizza team” rule (if it takes more than two pizzas to feed the team, it’s too big) aligns with what many organizations have discovered independently.
The optimal squad size for planning effectiveness tends to be:
- 3-4 developers: This range provides redundancy without excessive coordination overhead.
- Plus 1-2 additional roles: Such as a product manager/owner and a designer or QA specialist.
This size confers several key planning advantages:
- Resilience through redundancy: With 3+ developers, the team can continue functioning when someone is unavailable.
- Knowledge distribution: The team is small enough for everyone to have a general understanding of the entire codebase but large enough to distribute knowledge.
- Meaningful accountability: The team is small enough that accountability can’t be diffused, yet large enough that it doesn’t fall solely on individuals.
- Manageable planning complexity: Planning for 3-4 developers is tractable without requiring elaborate coordination mechanisms.
- Social cohesion: The team is small enough to form strong social bonds and establish shared norms.
Spotify, often cited for its influential squad model, typically targets 6-8 total team members, with no more than 5 developers. This allows squads to maintain autonomy while avoiding the fragility of individual dependencies or the coordination overhead of larger groups.
Planning at the Squad Level, Not the Individual Level
When using RoadmapOne, you plan the initiatives/objectives that each squad will work on, and allow the squad to develop their own key results - i.e. how to tackle the problem. This approach allows for flexibility while maintaining clear accountability for outcomes.
This is similar to Basecamp, where teams plan at the “hill” level (similar to epics or initiatives) and allow squads to determine how to tackle them.
With properly sized squads, planning can shift from individual tasks to squad-level commitments, creating a more resilient approach:
- Collective ownership: The entire squad takes responsibility for delivery, not just individuals.
- Adaptive task assignment: The squad determines internally who works on what, adapting to availability and expertise.
- Capacity-based planning: Planning focuses on what the squad can accomplish as a unit, not individual schedules.
- Predictability through averaging: Individual estimation variance averages out at the squad level, increasing overall predictability.
I was recently asked to advise a Private Equity owned Fintech because their owners were seeing zero impact (except to the cost line) from Product & Enginering. Using RoadmapOne, the team transitioned from individual to squad-level planning with properly sized squads (4 developers plus a product owner and designer), with each squad being allocated to delivering against a selected business objective. Within three months, Sprint delivery predictability improved from 65% to over 90% and, more importantly, the focus on business outcomes meant that Product & Engineering were suddenly seen as a driver of top-line growth, not just a money pit.
Squad Structure Impact on Planning Horizon
Squad size doesn’t just affect day-to-day planning—it also influences how far into the future you can effectively plan:
| Squad Size | Effective Planning Horizon | Planning Approach |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2 developers | Days to 1 week | Highly reactive, focused on immediate tasks |
| 3-4 developers | 2-6 weeks | Sprint or milestone-based planning with clear features |
| 5-8+ developers | Highly variable, often either very short-term or overly rigid long-term | Requires heavy coordination mechanisms, often becomes administrative rather than adaptive |
The ideal 3-4 developer squad enables a planning sweet spot: far enough ahead to be strategic (2-6 weeks) but adaptable enough to respond to changes. This horizon fits perfectly with agile cadences while providing enough stability for stakeholder alignment.
Implementing Optimal Squad Sizing
Let the team managers break their teams into multiple squads, preserving existing management hierarchy, and allocate Product Owners/Designers/QAs/DevOps per squad. It will quickly become clear whether you have enough Product Managers for the squads to be maximally productive. That’s one of the super-cool outcomes from this. We can all stop kidding ourselve and start building organisations with the right balance of resources.
However, if your organization is large and hasn’t built the “change muscle”, a more considered approach with pilot squads might be more appropriate:
- Assess current state: Map out the current team structure and identify where individual dependencies or oversized teams exist.
- Identify natural boundaries: Look for natural dividing lines in your product or architecture to define squad boundaries.
- Start with pilot squads: Restructure one or two teams to the optimal size and document improvements in predictability and resilience.
- Train for collective ownership: Help teams transition from individual to collective planning through training and facilitation.
- Adjust planning ceremonies: Modify sprint planning, daily standups, and retrospectives to focus on squad-level commitments rather than individual tasks.
- Measure success differently: Shift from individual utilization metrics to squad-level throughput and predictability.
We’ve been working with a SaaS company in the building sector. They reorganised their 50-person development team into multiple squads, each comprising 2-3 developers, and used RoadmapOne to build an outcome-oriented roadmap. Within 4 months:
- The level of productivity increased as squads built tight relationships with their colleagues
- Delivery predictability increased as the team stopped wasting time on “hobbies” that seemed interesting but weren’t aligned with customer outcomes
- Having each squad clearly focused on outcomes created a virtuous circle: they shipped more meaningful functionality to the customer; which improved team morale; which meant they shipped even more meaningful functionality…
- All of which contributed to a very significant jump in the company’s growth trajectory
Common Questions About Squad Sizing
Q: What if we have specialized expertise that only one person has?
A: This is exactly the vulnerability that proper squad sizing helps address. Implement pair programming, documentation sprints, and knowledge-sharing sessions to distribute critical expertise. Consider rotation of responsibilities within the squad to build redundancy.
Q: Won’t moving to squad-level planning reduce individual accountability?
A: The opposite typically occurs. When a properly sized squad collectively commits to outcomes, peer accountability often becomes stronger than manager-imposed accountability. No one wants to let their teammates down.
Q: What about specializations within development (frontend, backend, etc.)?
A: For most product work, cross-functional squads deliver better results than specialized teams. However, if you must have specialization, ensure each specialty has at least 2-3 people so you don’t create single points of failure.
Q: How do we handle initiatives that require more than 4-5 developers?
A: Break large initiatives into components that can be owned by distinct squads. Define clear interfaces between these components. Use lightweight coordination mechanisms (like Scrum of Scrums) to synchronize across squads.
Conclusion
Squad size might seem like a minor detail in the grand scheme of product development, but it fundamentally shapes your planning and delivery effectiveness. Individual-level planning creates dangerous dependencies, while oversized squads dilute accountability and increase coordination overhead.
The sweet spot—squads of 3-4 developers plus supporting roles—delivers the best of both worlds: enough redundancy to handle absences and unexpected events, but small enough to maintain cohesion and clear accountability. This optimal size enables planning at the squad level rather than the individual level, creating the resilience and predictability that stakeholders crave.
As you reevaluate your team structures, remember that the goal isn’t just administrative tidiness—it’s creating the conditions for sustainable delivery. When properly sized squads take collective ownership of outcomes, they develop internal mechanisms for handling variability without compromising external commitments. This resilience transforms planning from a fragile wish list into a reliable roadmap for product success.
References
- Sutherland, J. & Schwaber, K. (2020). The Scrum Guide. https://scrumguides.org/
- Brooks, F. (1995). The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering . Addison-Wesley Professional. Long-in-the-tooth, and advocating for 8 person teams is anachronistic, but you can’t talk about teams and planning without referencing the classics!
- Bezos, J. (2013). The “Two-Pizza Rule” for Team Size. CNBC . Work on the priciple that developers can easily eat 2/3 of a Pizza.
- Kniberg, H. & Ivarsson, A. (2012). Scaling Agile @ Spotify. PDF
- DeMarco, T. & Lister, T. (2013). Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams . Addison-Wesley Professional.
- Dunbar, R. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6), 469-493. Science Direct