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The default team
A default team is five engineers, one designer, and one PM. Claude Code multiplies the engineers' output two to three times, while PMs and designers gain less leverage, so both roles are squeezed.
The two-week rule
The fix is a rule of thumb. When a project is two engineering weeks or less, the engineer handles what a PM would, such as talking to security, legal, and other stakeholders, while the PM advises and steps in only if things go wildly off track. Past two weeks, the PM stays squarely accountable, though more of the work is delegated to engineers.
Where judgment comes in
The line is a judgment call: a one-week project that is extremely controversial should still be driven by the PM. Engineers who are product-minded become worth an order of magnitude more under this setup, and the team still plans to hire a lot of PMs.
Why does faster coding squeeze other roles?
Eliyahu Goldratt's 1984 book The Goal argued that the output of any system is limited by its bottleneck, and that speeding up a step that is not the bottleneck changes little. When engineers build two to three times faster, the constraint moves to the work that feeds them and surrounds them, such as deciding what to build, designing it, and aligning stakeholders. Product managers and designers then carry the same load at a larger scale. Goldratt's framework is known as the Theory of Constraints.
Why do small teams need less process?
The number of possible communication links between people grows with the square of team size: five people have 10 links, and ten people have 45. Frederick Brooks made this point about software teams in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. Fewer links mean fewer handoffs where context gets lost. Amazon's two-pizza team rule, attributed to Jeff Bezos, sets team size by how many people two pizzas can feed.
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