10 people can outdo 90 people. It could sound ridiculous and a bit funny, right? Are you reading it back? How can a few outperform the majority? And w

Price's Law: Square root of people and productivity

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2024-05-07 14:30:04

10 people can outdo 90 people. It could sound ridiculous and a bit funny, right? Are you reading it back? How can a few outperform the majority? And we haven't even started on its formula of square root law. For the record, let's base everything on equal terms.

Foremost we should understand that productivity and output are not linearly tied to the number of people involved in any task. Just because more people are working on something does not mean it will produce more results. In fact, we all have heard many times, "Too many cooks spoil the food".

Let's read about an interesting law named "Price's Law" that tries to explain this predictive analogy. Price's Law says that "the square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work". This often explains the skewed distribution of productivity or success, where a small number of individuals or teams are responsible for a significant portion of the overall result. Having said all, it's also very important to understand that Price's Law is based on experiments and statistical analysis; it's a principle not a fact. It can really differ from the reality.

The best 100 people in the cohort of 10,000 who end up doing half of the work often possess certain qualities and skills that set them apart from the other 9900. So as the team grows, competence grows linearly but incompetence grows exponentially.[1]