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# The most productive thing
- URL: https://www.petercai.com/most-productive-thing/
- Published: 2024-07-25T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2024-07-25T12:00:00.000Z
- Description: Maximizing productivity is not the same thing as relieving shortages. It usually means doing more of what you're already doing really well - even if it means neglecting weaknesses.
- Author: Peter Cai
- Tags: #Import 2026-08-11 22:26

A common conversation topic I'm in is "how to staff up an engineering team in the early stages of growth." How many hires, and what skills?

There are easy truisms like:

- It's better for a startup to have more work than too many people, and
- Hiring generalists over specialists maximizes utilization and flexibility.

Here's an example that demonstrates a less intuitive concept: let's say you get budget to make a new hire, and you run two teams -

**Team A:** 8 highly productive, overworked engineers  
**Team B:** 5 less productive, but extremely overworked engineers

Many make the mistake of hiring for team B. After all:

- They're more overworked
- There are fewer people (something about subconscious biases towards balance?)

Of course, you should strongly prefer hiring for team A, since that's almost certainly a better return on investment. *Maximizing productivity is not the same thing as relieving shortages*. Usually it means [doing more of what you're already doing really well](https://www.petercai.com/everything-i-learned-about-startups-i-learned-from-video-games/) \- even if it means neglecting weaknesses. Sometimes leaders fall into the trap of filling niche roles too early, because of perceived gaps in an org -- even when those gaps are really not important yet, limiting how productive any specialist can be.

When does it make sense to hire for team B again? Only when it's the most productive thing.

- Maybe a bottleneck forms and a hire will unlock productivity for a downstream/upstream team.
- Maybe the leader debugs the people/process and increases team efficiency.
- Maybe the whole team is redirected towards a goal and a mission that has a higher return.

Doing the most productive thing, repeatedly, naturally leads to specialization, which seems to work well at almost any layer of abstraction -- individuals, firms, even entire countries. It'll probably work for your engineering team too.