How to think about span of control | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership

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I’m seeing a renewed interest in the topic of team size and the span of control of managers. Most of this is coming from a questioning of how we do everything now that agentic software development is disrupting our existing patterns of work. I think this is a topic where a lot of people don’t understand the tradeoffs, and I’d like to share some perspective on span of control and team size.

Span of control and team size

Span of control is how many direct reports your managers have.

Team size is how large each team is.

While these seem like they should be the same thing, a manager can have multiple teams. So it can be true that you have team sizes of four people, but managers have a span of control of eight.

Span of control

You are juggling a lot of tradeoffs, some of which you may not be aware of.

A good place to start is:

Choose a low span of control for innovation and local effectiveness.

Choose a large span of control if you want efficiency and scale .

The larger the span of control, the flatter your organization

This table shows the number of direct reports per manager and how that interacts with the number of layers in the organization.

The numbers in yellow are the number of possible employees . If you exceed that number, you need larger teams, or another layer of management.

Layers3 direct reports5 direct reports8 direct reports10 direct reports12 direct reports15 direct reports20 direct reports24691113162131331731111572414214401565851,1111,8853,6168,42151217814,68111,11122,62154,241168,42163643,90637,449111,111271,453813,6163,368,421<br>Here are a couple of examples:

If a CEO is willing to take on ten direct reports, they would have two layers of eleven people in the company (themself and ten direct reports). And three layers at twelve people.

With four layers (CEO, reporting to CEO, front line managers, and individual contributors), with an average of eight direct reports, the company can have up to 585 employees.

A few things to note:

There is also a minimum number of employees this supports. If you go below that minimum, then you either need less layers, or a smaller number of direct reports.

Keep in mind this is the average span of control.

So basically, you’re choosing between small teams, but more layers. Or large teams, with less layers. And there are all sorts of implications of those choices.

Levels of management = complexity

The complexity in organizations explodes with each additional layer of management. You often see a different type of problem emerge as each layer is added. For example, in startups you may find that early on, a lot of the challenges are around dividing into teams. But as you add a director layer, the problems become about coordinating between teams (and cross-team projects). And as you add a VP layer, you’ll find a whole other set of challenges around coordination for large projects and overall structures of teams.

Because of this, you’ll find that a lot of leaders are biased towards large spans of control and want to flatten the organizational hierarchy. Flatter hierarchies result in more clarity and less organizational complexity. Nic Benders, a former coworker of mine: “You can optimize an organization for execution by reducing layers. And the easiest way to reduce layers is to have larger spans of control. Especially in the executive + middle-management tiers.” (quoted here)

A lot of individual contributors and frontline managers may not be very conscious of these benefits, but it affects them too. When there are challenges and you have to go multiple levels up a hierarchy to have them resolved, those problems get resolved much slower, and they are competing for many other problems that are also navigating the same hierarchy. Basically, a large span of control minimizes one dimension of organizational complexity, which is the number of layers.

Benefits of a large span of control

The primary benefit of a large span of control is reduced complexity, which improves communication, organization wide execution, and clarity. But there are some other benefits as well:

Can prevent micromanaging and having managers excessively involved in the work of individual contributors.

Can require fewer reorgs, because more can be done within the span of control of a director or VP.

Enablers for large span of control

These things help:

Work that is more homogenous.

Senior and self-directed team members.

Autonomy and local decision-making with good context and direction.

Strong systems, standards, and documentation that reduces the manager as a routing layer and decision-maker.

Colocation or strong async work practices.

Challenges of a large span of control

Why don’t all companies just immediately implement huge spans of control? Well, there are trade-offs, of course. You’re trading off complexity caused by the number of...