The Case for Smaller Creative Teams

Why adding people to a project almost never makes it better

There's a persistent belief in the industry that bigger projects require bigger teams. More stakeholders, more specialists, more layers of approval. In our experience, the opposite is true. The best work we've produced has come from the smallest teams — three to five people who are fully aligned and empowered to make decisions without a chain of command.

A team of four that trusts each other will outperform a team of twelve that needs to schedule a meeting to make a decision.

The cost of coordination

Every person you add to a project adds communication overhead. Two people have one line of communication. Five people have ten. Twelve people have sixty-six. That's sixty-six potential misunderstandings, misalignments, and delays. Most large teams spend more energy staying synchronized than actually producing work. The meeting about the meeting isn't a joke — it's a structural inevitability of scale.

Makers over managers

This doesn't mean we avoid collaboration. It means we're intentional about who's in the room. Every person on a project should be there because they're making something — not because they need to be informed. We structure our projects around makers, not managers. If someone's primary function is to relay information between two other people, that's a sign the team is too big.

How we structure a typical project

A standard project for us has a creative lead, a designer, a photographer or developer depending on the deliverable, and direct access to the client decision-maker. That's it. The feedback loop is shorter, the ownership is clearer, and the work moves at the speed of conversation rather than the speed of email. When we need a specialist — a retoucher, a motion designer, a copywriter — they come in for a defined scope and leave. No standing meetings. No status updates. Just the work.