How to think about span of control

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,…