The most common mistake I see leaders make with team composition is treating it as a static organizational chart problem rather than a dynamic tool that should adapt to context. The question isn’t “what’s the best team structure?” but rather “what team structure serves our current organizational context and business needs?”
In my experience, successful team composition comes down to understanding three critical factors: organizational maturity, urgency requirements, and business value connection. Get these wrong, and even the most talented teams will struggle to deliver meaningful impact.
The Business Value Connection Imperative
Before diving into contexts and structures, there’s one principle that underlies everything: teams must be tightly connected to the business value they deliver. This isn’t just about having clear goals—it’s about creating a direct line of sight between team activities and measurable business outcomes.
Teams that lose this connection become what I call “self-validating”—they exist simply to exist. Without connection to business metrics, they can never reach a “good enough” state that allows them to pass responsibility on and take on new challenges. These teams will find work to justify their existence indefinitely, paying engineers forever in a cycle where none of them really grow.
The warning signs are clear: when teams become more interested in their own stability and welfare than solving for user experience or business value, they’ve become self-serving rather than value-serving.
Organizational Maturity as a Primary Context
Your organization’s maturity fundamentally shapes what team structures will be effective. Each stage comes with different constraints, capabilities, and strategic priorities.
Startup Phase: High Entropy, High Velocity
Startups operate in a high-entropy environment where rapid iteration and immediate value delivery are paramount. The organization needs to move fast, change direction quickly, and maximize learning per dollar spent.
In this context, smaller teams of senior people tend to work exceptionally well. They know what good looks like, require minimal oversight, and can deliver outcomes quickly. The lack of junior team members isn’t a problem—the focus is on short-term outcomes, not long-term people development.
Scale-up Phase: Growing While Maintaining Velocity
As organizations grow, they face the challenge of maintaining velocity while building sustainable practices. You can’t staff every initiative with all-senior teams—there simply aren’t enough senior people, and it’s economically unsustainable.
This phase requires mixed-experience teams that balance delivery capability with growth opportunities. The organization needs to start thinking about mentorship, knowledge transfer, and building capability for the future.
Enterprise Phase: Stability and Specialization
Large organizations have different constraints entirely. They can’t move as fast, but they have resources for specialization and long-term thinking. Team structures that would be disruptive at this scale need to be used judiciously.
Strike teams can still work in large organizations, but they will be disruptive. The key is understanding when that disruption is worth it versus when stability and predictability are more valuable.
Urgency as a Deciding Factor
The urgency of your current challenges significantly impacts which team structures will be effective. This isn’t just about deadlines—it’s about the strategic importance of speed versus other considerations.
High Urgency: When Speed Trumps Everything
When facing existential deadlines, competitive threats, or critical opportunities, disruption becomes acceptable. This is when smaller, senior-heavy teams make sense even in larger organizations. The short-term cost in terms of organizational disruption is worth the rapid value delivery.
Medium Urgency: Balancing Speed and Sustainability
Most organizational challenges fall into this category. You need to deliver, but you also need to build capability, maintain team health, and think about the future. This calls for balanced team structures that can deliver while growing people and maintaining sustainable practices.
Low Urgency: Investment in Future Capability
When you have the luxury of time, you can optimize for learning, growth, and building organizational capability. This is when you can afford more junior-heavy teams, longer planning cycles, and structures that prioritize development over immediate delivery.
Establishing Business Value Connection
The organization needs to either be projecting a vision that needs to be delivered on a timescale (in a more emergent state) or using OKR-style metrics to lead the organization toward delivering the shape of change it needs.
Vision-Driven Organizations
In rapidly changing or innovative contexts, clear vision with specific timescales can provide the business value connection. Teams understand what they’re building toward and can make decisions that serve that vision even when specific metrics aren’t yet clear.
Metrics-Driven Organizations
More mature organizations often benefit from OKR-style frameworks that create clear connections between team activities and business outcomes. The key is ensuring metrics drive the right behaviors rather than becoming ends in themselves.
The Hybrid Approach
Many successful organizations use both approaches simultaneously—vision for direction and inspiration, metrics for accountability and course correction.
Making the Choice: A Framework
When deciding on team composition, ask these questions in order:
- What’s our organizational maturity? This determines your constraints and capabilities.
- What’s the urgency level? This determines how much disruption you can accept.
- How will this team connect to business value? This determines the accountability structure.
- What capabilities do we need to build for the future? This determines the experience mix.
The answers to these questions should point you toward specific team structures and compositions. But remember—team composition isn’t a one-time decision. As context changes, team structures should evolve to match.
The Cost of Misalignment
Get this wrong, and the costs compound quickly. Senior-heavy teams in low-urgency situations waste expensive talent on work that could develop junior people. Junior-heavy teams in high-urgency situations fail to deliver when speed matters most. Teams without business value connection become resource drains that resist change and optimization.
The key insight is that there’s no universally “best” team structure—only structures that fit or don’t fit their context. The skill is in reading that context accurately and adapting accordingly.
Success comes from treating team composition as a strategic tool that adapts to serve your organization’s current needs while building capability for future challenges.