Individuals matter

People matter. The article shows that modeling teams as collections of interchangeable heads collapses when work starts: managers guess delivery based on who is assigned, not on realistic capacity, and roadmaps quickly become fiction. The author cites countless examples where a plan lists "one person for a quarter" or "two people for three quarters" without accounting for skill, motivation, or past performance, and the resulting uncertainty forces teams to replan or abandon projects once the actual personnel are known.\n\nBudgeting in terms of "heads" creates a second layer of distortion. Finance translates dollars into a fixed number of staff-level positions, ignoring that a single highly effective engineer can generate far more value than the budget assumes. The piece describes hiring managers who want a specialist but are blocked by headcount limits, and an engineer who was cut to a lower salary for moving abroad and left, despite delivering millions in profit. Attrition targets further amplify the problem: when HR pushes for a "healthy" turnover rate, the most productive engineers leave at disproportionate rates, eroding the company's core capabilities.\n\nThese dynamics are not limited to tech firms. Aid organizations and charities face similar issues when they treat teams as interchangeable units, favoring projects with easy-to-quantify outcomes over high-impact, skill-intensive work. The author argues that the drive for legibility-making complex systems appear simple by assuming fungibility-produces inefficient outcomes, especially when value follows a heavy-tailed distribution where a few individuals generate outsized returns.\n\nThe practical takeaway for leaders is to stop abstracting people into headcount. Invest in recognizing individual strengths, adjust budgeting to reflect real contribution, and avoid policies that treat attrition as a metric to hit. By doing so, roadmaps become actionable, hiring aligns with real needs, and organizations retain the talent that drives disproportionate value.