3 ideas
Teams should have between four and eight engineers, because below that threshold they cannot sustain on-call rotations or absorb attrition without collapsing. When demand exceeds capacity, the fix is never to add scattered individuals but to consolidate into a few fully-staffed teams and let unstaffed areas explicitly go unaddressed.
Organizational problems behave like systems of stocks (accumulated quantities) and flows (rates of change), where intervention points produce delayed and counterintuitive effects. Modeling these dynamics explicitly reveals that adding resources to a constrained system often makes things worse before equilibrium shifts, so leaders should diagram the feedback loops before acting.
As systems grow, migrations are the sole reliable way to manage accumulated technical complexity, and an organization's ability to execute them determines whether its technical debt compounds or stays bounded. Each migration should fully deprecate the old path rather than leave both running, since unfinished migrations multiply the surface area future migrations must cover.