Your team is behind on the work, and they say they need to hire

Your team is behind on the work, and they say they need to hire more people, so you hire three more people.

And somehow…they are now more behind.

Fred Brooks wrote about this decades ago in The Mythical Man-Month. His law: adding people to a late project often makes it later, not faster.

Why? New people need ramp time. Communication lines explode. Context gets diluted. The work that needed deep focus turns into meetings about the work.

Founders - feel this every time we throw bodies at a bottleneck. Sales is behind, so add reps. Product is slipping, so add engineers. Ops is drowning, so hire coordinators.

Sometimes that is the right move, but more often it is a move that slows the very thing we were trying to speed up.

Before you hire your way out of a backlog, ask yourself:

1. What important work is consistently not getting done? Is demand sustained, seasonal, or a temporary backlog?

2. Where does work actually get throttled? Execution, approvals, missing expertise, unclear priorities, or rework?

3. What can this new person own independently? What decisions can they make without permission?

4. How much useful work will this new person add after subtracting training, supervision, coordination, and rework?

5. When will the added capacity of a new person outweigh the initial disruption? Will the need still exist then? Is the outcome worth the full cost?

Sometimes speed comes from fewer moving parts, clearer ownership, and giving a few people big goals and responsibilities.

Have you ever added people to a late project and watched it slow down?