Ultimately, there is no golden rule. One has to choose what's best for your customers and your stage of growth.
Ultimately, there is no golden rule. One has to choose what's best for your customers and your stage of growth.
> We’ve seen more than a few companies raise millions of dollars in funding, go out and hire an army of people in an attempt to grow faster. However, unlike most other software products, search tech is an inherently hard thing to get right. It requires a lot of tedious R&D iterations over long periods of time and it cannot be parallelized by having X number of people working on it in parallel.
> When a large team congregates around work that cannot be parallelized, we’ve observed that new work gets created to keep everyone busy - new nice-to-have features get worked on. This ends up adding complexity to the product. New team routines are invented because there’s bandwidth available. This ends up adding communication overhead and layers between users and builders and slows down the pace of innovation. This sadly becomes a vicious cycle that dilutes the core product.
(I'd go further than "diluted" - sometimes the essentials of the core product remain broken for years because all the energy goes to managing those side features, even though they don't work properly with a broken core.)