March 13, 2025
Small development teams with a laser focus on the fundamental purpose for an application achieve far superior results than larger teams. The development of instant messaging (IM) apps in China 15 years ago provides the perfect example of this. As someone who was in China there at the time before emigrating to the United States, I took notice of how a small team managed to succeed where bigger teams failed. Back in 2010, there were three major development teams working on instant messaging apps. Among those three teams, WeChat was the smallest and had the least funding. In fact, the other two teams had financial and human resources that were at least a hundred times greater than Allen Zhang’s WeChat team.