How conviction dies: Metcalfe's Law
You were in the showers and an idea pops to mind 💡, it's a new feature you want to build. Or it's a new flow you want to design. Perhaps a new way to position the product for your sales call.
What do you do?
In a startup, you bring it up during standup that morning and execute on it that afternoon.
In a larger organization, you often write up your proposal and float it by your stakeholders. Tweak and iterate until you've gotten approval to move forward. (This could take weeks or months depending on the size of the company)
While there's no right or wrong, the cost of communication as the team grows has a real impact on new ideas on your team.
Cost of communication
Your idea in the shower? That's your conviction forming on a hypothesis, that you believe X might work. Are you right? Only your customers can tell.
However, what do you need to do afterward: whether that's telling your cofounder in a 3 person startup) or go collect signatures at a larger organization. That's the cost of communication before you can execute on the idea.
Don't get me wrong, teammates are great. You need a team to accomplish great things. But, there is a very tangible cost of team size → cost of communication on new ideas.
The truth is: no new idea ever sounds like a good idea to everyone at that moment.
By definition, if it were an obviously great idea to everyone, it would've been implemented ages ago. So for every new idea, there's something you know that others don't that made you think of that idea.
Maybe it's from a conversation that you had with a customer.
Maybe it's another company's product you tried out that sparked inspiration.
The bottom line is: something clicked that caused you to come up with a new belief — that this time, this idea of yours, just might work.
Cofounder and you
In a small team or startup, you find yourself moving incredibly fast. This is the case because it's easy and quick to communicate new ideas with the team and get buy-in before you implement them.
When it's just the 2 of you, you really need to convince one person to "let me try it!" before you can go ahead and change up the codebase.
At the simplest form: when you're working on an idea yourself, solo founder. You just need to convince yourself that the idea is "worth a shot" before you implement it!
However, this dynamic exponentially changes as the team size grows...
Chain of approvals in larger teams
In a larger team, the process goes a little differently: getting buy-in for your idea to be "worth that shot" often requires a whole approval process.
Goes something like this:
Imagine if you work at the local blacksmith and as a young apprentice, you want to build a new weapon!
You have an idea that same morning. (You want to ship a new weapon: an iron flail!)
But... you can't really execute on it that afternoon. In fact, you would first bring it up to your manager or maybe wait till the next Friday on the weekly roadmap meeting.
Often times your manager would ask you: "have you asked Steve, Fred, and James for their feedback?". What you're really saying is: "have you gotten Steve, Fred, and James's permission? Because they're your stakeholders and I don't want their managers to complain to me 3 weeks from now."
Over the next few weeks: through 1-on-1 meetings and group presentations, you get everyone's feedback and incorporate their great advice into your idea. Even if you don't fully agree... in order to get their permission, you need to incorporate their feedback.
A couple of months have passed by and your final copy is done! You bring it back to the team for a final review to get that final stamp of approval.
You're happy because you're shipping your first product. Tho... it looks a little different from your first sketches: instead of a flail, ended up becoming an iron ball… 🙃
The real cost and danger of these chains of approval are that the cost of communication wares down the conviction of your initial idea: each feedback is oftentimes like sandpaper to the sword you're crafting. It dulls the edges until you're left with an iron ball. Still takes up the same amount of resources to make, but won't cut through the noise of the market.
Side note: You'll notice that this is particularly difficult on those who aren't as articulate or good at communicating their ideas to large groups of people. This is the basis of politicking — getting others to buy-in to your idea and point of view.
Structurally speaking, you're rewarding those who are good at this particular skillset. Which has little correlation with your ability to build or generate great ideas. Over time, those who thrive are those who are good at navigating politics.
Metcalfe's law... adjusted
Metcalfe’s Law states the value of a communications network grows in proportion to the square of the number of users on the network (N^2 where N is the total number of users on the network). C = N^2
That holds true in a social network in regards to communication, the same way it holds true among your team.
What I refer to as "communication tax" is the extra conversation that each member needs to have when you add an additional member to your team.
Adjusting for Metcalfe's law because you don't need to convince yourself or communicate with yourself. The formula becomes: C_adj = N^2 - N
This is an exponential relationship: it's not a big impact for 3-5 people, but the tax of the extra communication starts to rise sharply as you add further people.
This is why it's hard to build breakthrough products in large teams for this exact reason. By the time you've "solicited feedback" from everyone, it's sandpapered your idea so much that you lose the sharpness of your edge.
This can be solved in 2 ways:
Allowing people to ignore teammate's feedback
Reducing the size of the teams
(maybe article for another day)
The point here is:
For each additional node in the team, there’s an implicit tax of communication on every other member on the team.
This has profound impacts on new ideas.
Often times… you know deep down why that idea is good, but you might not have figured out how to articulate it yet.
In larger organizations, those ideas never see the light of day. That is the price you’re paying.
Examples
E.g. good examples of this theory in practice:
Thanks @kentf for sending that over!
(I'll leave that article for another day.)