How Many People Are On Your Core Product Team?

For the last four years, Actuation Consulting, has been conducting market research on what makes  product teams successful. I had the privilege of helping with the most recent study and they found that:

  • Companies with less than $50 M in annualized revenues have between one to nine core team members. (42% of organizations have between one to four team members. Another 38% have five to nine core team members)
  • Companies from $50 M to $499 M shows the largest team size with between ten to thirty team members being dominant. (This appears to be a temporary phase brought on by rapid scaling and increased levels of specialization.)
  • Companies that grows larger than $500 M the size of teams gets whittled down again. Thirty-nine percent of companies with over $500 M up to $2 B in annualized revenues state that they have five to nine core team members with ten to thirty the next most popular category with 26% of responses.
  • Finally, the majority of companies with over $2B in annual revenues also state their core product teams are primarily made up of five to nine team members (35%). However, ten to thirty is close behind at thirty-one percent.

Overall, product team size tends to contract to between five to nine core team members. To learn more about average product team to compare with your company, check out the study.