As Columbo (for younger people: Steve Jobs) used to say: just one more thing.
I should have actually started with this one. The single most consistent thing I noticed whenever I got more done in less time is that we were using less of everything.
Well, thank you, Captain Obvious. Can I go now? So we do more with less, by… let me check… doing more with less?
Ok, let me explain.
So far, I have written about technology - how you should use simpler things, fewer things, fewer simple things, yadda-yadda.
It works because of two reasons: the first one is that new tools got better by compressing and hiding the complexity that these had (and that you had to learn and maintain) before. Marketing folks call it The Democratization of Whatever.
Computers got dramatically better in the last 50 years. In ancient times, you had to be able to build your computer or know how to use punch cards. A bit later, you needed to remember all DOS commands. The Mac and Windows let normal people use computers, too. Now if you are adventurous, (or work in a nasty place) you ask it what you should do.
Similarly, when you built software, you needed someone who knew how to run a database, someone who knew networks, and then someone else who could actually program. Later, databases got good enough to run without a DBA (for a good while). I can just click a server to life on AWS without ever knowing much about how it works and how it’s connected to where. (And you have even fancier things like serverless functions, from which you should keep away from btw.)
Initially, none of these things are very good. Then, over time, they get better, and suddenly, you can do the thing that used to take 10 people and a month in two hours all by yourself.
These things are happening all the time, but not everyone notices, let alone adapts to them.
The second thing is the same thing will happening teams too, because they can now use all this stuff.
If you ever worked in a small startup team where the front-end developer was also the designer, the designer could write HTML and also copy, the product manager was also the founder (and everyone was also customer service), you remember how quickly you could get things done.
The opposite is finding yourself in a big company, where you have a lot of everything, but nothing ever gets done. There are so many teams, each with a scope that was just one of the things a single person in your startup team did. You are told it’s “because of scale”.
Quickly making sense of what’s happening and making decisions are an amazing advantage when you build a product. Then, as companies grow, they undo all these things “because of scale” but also because this is the thing we have always done.
Probably later than we think (but sooner than we hope) AI may come for specific job functions: today you can already have 100 (not very bright, but eager) interns by AI, tomorrow you will just “talk to the database” and ask for an analysis, instead of waiting for a BI analyst to do it for you.
Smaller teams get things done faster because they ship while a big team spends time on coordination and “alignment”. Today, a small team can already go much further than it could even 5 years ago, so we should look at the way we scale teams.
So yes, do more, with less.