The Biggest Temptation of a Software CEO

In his book, The Five Temptations of a CEO, author Patrick Lencioni discusses five areas in which CEOs tend to inadvertently prioritize the wrong things. These “temptations”, as he calls them, can lead to poor decision making at best, and can risk the very survival of the company at worst. My experience leading a software company taught me that there is a sixth temptation, unique to software, that seemed to present itself on a near-daily basis. More specifically:

The biggest temptation of a software CEO is to throw bodies (specifically engineers) at problems.

It is this sixth temptation that I struggled with most frequently. With the benefit of hindsight, I’ve come to a few realizations that I’d like to share with fellow software CEOs in hopes that they’ll do a better job of managing this temptation than I did. Among other lessons, I share how the following realities should shape the decision of whether or not (and by how much) to increase the size of the company's engineering team:

1. Communication channels grow non-linearly as team size increases
2. Work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion
3. The development team will never be big enough
4. One unit of additional capacity often doesn’t produce a unit of additional output
5. When CEOs add more developers, they’re often attempting to solve the wrong problem
6. It’s much easier to add than it is to take away
7. Hiring engineers can be a very difficult hire to quantify 

Please enjoy!