Bas Vodde in the bay area, one of the founders have less.

Lancer: What does scaling mean?

Bas: Ahh…

Lancer: Why do people care about scaling?

Bas: Well, that’s a different question. (cue music)

Why do people care about scaling? Because, well, I guess there is a valid reason to not so valid reason; is that some products you probably can only be build if you have more than one team. You need to figure out how to build a product with more than one team. Why do many companies care about scaling is they have more than one team. They don’t necessarily need it, but you know, large products, get, large try all kinds of different reasons. And once they have more than one team, they will need to figure out how to work with more than one team.

And for years I tried to convince products that they don’t need so much people working on the product. Then I realized that, that’s not useful because most of the products will have lots of people are not going to suddenly remove much of these people. So instead of trying to convince people they don’t need so much people, we asked the question, so how can we get them to work with so much people and if they would work well, then it became pretty obvious that they need so much people. So therefore we started caring more about stopping fighting the battle. You don’t need to scale even though that’s often still true.

Lancer: Next episode, Bas will tell us about how scaling badly takes the fun out of product development.