> Being in the same space physically I think speeds up a lot of things. In small teams and esp. at early stage startups your whole day is a meeting where things are discussed and resolved spontaneously.
Who's going to write the fine-detail code if they whole day is a meeting? It may change from case to case, but for some small teams the biggest challenge is to produce something so good that it out-competes the product of teams significantly larger. A brilliant idea gets you 5% of the way, the rest is getting busy with very boring details and corner cases.
My small teams and startup experience: none of that boring work gets done as soon as there are two people together. Simply put, social interaction is way nicer than boring work. This is not just technical development work, but even commercial research. I know this is a thought crime, but I sometimes feel like it would be a good idea to lock the socialite sales person in a room with no human contact whatsoever until they finish that Excel spreadsheet.
Who's going to write the fine-detail code if they whole day is a meeting? It may change from case to case, but for some small teams the biggest challenge is to produce something so good that it out-competes the product of teams significantly larger. A brilliant idea gets you 5% of the way, the rest is getting busy with very boring details and corner cases.
My small teams and startup experience: none of that boring work gets done as soon as there are two people together. Simply put, social interaction is way nicer than boring work. This is not just technical development work, but even commercial research. I know this is a thought crime, but I sometimes feel like it would be a good idea to lock the socialite sales person in a room with no human contact whatsoever until they finish that Excel spreadsheet.