I am talking like teams of more than 10 engineers that took months to deliver simple features. Most of the engineers were spending their time fighting their IDE, local setup and finding a purpose.
Best project I worked on, it was in a team of 3 people: manager + 2 engineers. I built the whole backend and the other guy the frontend stuff. Worked like a charm! We delivered on time and things just worked.
Sometime, less is better.
That's a pet peeve of mine. Adding more people feels more like a company "ego" inflation injected by VCs so they "look good" and valuation goes up. External pressure. It can make good ideas and teams de-rail fast… processes will be introduced, knowledge silos will emerge (because how else would you justify your job in 6 months?), great people will leave because what they don't feel connected anymore. And you rarely observe this in bootstrapped companies.
There's this false pretense that adding more people will yield more "product". And that we need 1 person for infra, 1 person for backend, 1 person for web front-end, 1 person for iOS mobile, 1 person for android mobile, 1 person for… Outsiders only see these "labels" and head counts.
Growth != more people.
(ps. sorry if this looks unfinished and rant-y; I'm not exactly in a good mental space and needed to vent out a bit…)
I think you've conflated the success/ROI of the business with the need to hire more people.
Success is not guaranteed, no matter how impressed we are with an idea or how proud we are of its execution. A leadership team over a long enough period of time running the business and constantly looking at "the numbers" will develop some intuition of how to steer the ship. They'll make plans for what they think they need to do to increase the chances of success, with concrete facts and trends or just good storytelling. There's no magic bullet.
Your company may be mature enough that it has steady revenue so you need to protect that part of the business, because it's not fun to explain to investors that revenue is down because you pulled employees off known-revenue generating projects to do projects that may or may not move the needle. You need to be mindful that there will be future fundraising rounds, and you want existing investors to join them.
So you have to hire. You need to spend money to tackle new projects, to increase your chances of success, without impacting the existing success you've had and adding headcount is much cheaper/less risky than rocking the boat on existing projects or not tackling the new things.
But no plan is perfect, and even experienced leaders will make mistakes that will have negative consequences within the organization.
But in some cases, even without pulling people out of the team, growth is impacted by other factors e.g. competition. How to avoid such factors is definitely a challenge.
The very nature of exogenous factors is that we can only react to/worry about them.
When all is said and done, my board is going to ask me what I did "about it" which is an implicit invitation for me to explain why they should be confident in how I'm spending their money. If the numbers don't look good or good enough, I need to tell them what I'm doing to change that. That manifests as some slides in a board deck explaining projects, impacts, deadlines, and headcount. Maybe an org chart. Financial projections.
One investor will ask me if I really need those people. Another will ask how adding those people will affect the delivery schedule. Another will ask if there are any projects we're currently working on that we're maybe not excited about (or they're not) and if we could cut our losses.
Unless our runway is really low and we're uncertain in our confidence to raise another round, the general consensus will be to hire more people and not impact existing projects. Maybe you went expecting to hire 20, but "negotiated" down to 10. Sometimes you go in expecting to hire 20, and the board convinces you to hire 40.
Stepping away to take a walk helps clear the air, gets the blood moving, and changes up the surroundings. It's rarely the full solution, but quite often a good first start. Good luck, and take care.
Plenty of us have excuses for why our companies are not worth 76 million dollars per employee. Some of us don't even try. The point is you're right: It doesn't take a lot of people to create extraordinary value.
You really need a full-time "onboarding" engineer, or make a rotation for everyone to dogfood the onboarding process and update it.
Otherwise it falls on the new person to update the process, which is both education and frustrating, depending on how busy the rest of the teams are.
With 2x YoY growth you are always onboarding. You need to be multiplicative with your onboarding efforts. This means writing quality onboarding documentation, mentoring mentors, and codifying parts of the onboarding process (e.g. groups to join, permissions, etc.). Making other engineers effective is a very valuable use of time when so many people are ramping up at once.
It can feel exhausting, but mostly invigorating. There's always a feeling of energy; the hardest part can be setting boundaries to not let it consume your free time.