Via Lenny’s Podcast

“When you staff a project, is it better to overstaff or is it better to understaff, knowing that you can’t get it right?

Well, it’s better to understaff.

If you overstaff, you get everything you just said. You get politics. You get people working on things that are further down the priority list than necessary. […] That is poison. It’s wasteful. It slows you down. It creates cruft. And so it’s very clear that understaffing is less evil than overstaffing.”

— 10 contrarian leadership truths every leader needs to hear | Matt MacInnis (Rippling) at 11:30

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Matt MacInnis (Chief Product Officer and former longtime COO at Rippling) uses a management framework for decisions when you can’t know the exact right answer (budget allocation, staffing, deadlines): make your best guess, then decide whether to oversteer or understeer, knowing you won’t get it exactly right.

For staffing specifically, understaffing is clearly less evil:

• If you have 20 things on a stack-ranked list and must do the top 5, overstaffing means items 6-15 get worked on before you know if they’re necessary
• This creates waste, politics, and organizational cruft
• Understaffing keeps teams focused on what truly matters
• The art is in not under-understaffing to the point of breaking

At Rippling, everyone constantly asks for more resources—and that’s the right signal. It means they’re properly constrained and focused on priorities.