Google’s vice president of product has issued a stark warning about Silicon Valley’s obsession with lean teams, arguing that what he calls the “cult of lean” can actually kill great ideas and prevent technological breakthroughs from reaching their potential. Robby Stein’s comments come as both startups and Big Tech companies increasingly embrace minimal team structures as a core operational strategy.
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The Problem With Extreme Leanness
Speaking on “Lenny’s Podcast,” Stein described what he sees as a dangerous cultural trend in technology. “There’s a cult of lean, scrappy, fast, throw away your product quickly culture in the tech world,” he stated. While acknowledging that some internal conviction is necessary, Stein emphasized that building products that work for large audiences often requires more substantial investment than current lean-team dogma allows.
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“To build a product that works for a lot of people that is based on a technological breakthrough, a lot of times I see teams just give up too early or underinvest in the product,” he added. This perspective comes from Stein’s experience launching Instagram Stories before joining Google to lead AI-powered search products.
When Small Teams Become Counterproductive
Stein explained that teams can take scrappiness too far, remaining small for so long that their ideas never gain meaningful traction. In large companies, if a product doesn’t reach sufficient quality internally, “it just dies on the vine,” he noted. The problem extends to startups as well, which don’t have the luxury of endlessly iterating with tiny teams.
“By the time they learn what works, it may be too late,” Stein warned. He urged founders to think early about what kind of team can build a strong version of their product, rather than clinging to the romantic notion that two people can stay lean until achieving product-market fit.
The Scale Required for True Breakthroughs
Pointing to the massive effort behind foundational AI models, Stein highlighted how some innovations inherently demand substantial resources. These projects took years and involved hundreds of people, demonstrating that certain breakthroughs require both scale and patience that contradicts the lean-team playbook.
Recent technological developments support this perspective. According to recent analysis of innovation in medical technology, significant advances often emerge from well-resourced teams. Similarly, industry experts note that hardware development typically requires substantial team sizes and resources.
Signals for When to Scale
Stein identified two critical milestones that indicate when companies should invest and scale their teams:
- Internal conviction: When a team feels it has discovered something special and worth pursuing aggressively
- External validation: When real users beyond just friends consistently return to the product
“Invest enough to make the best version of it or as good a version as you can to get it out the door and to ship it,” Stein advised. “You can only really do that with the right group.”
The Counterargument: Lean Success Stories
Despite Stein’s warnings, the technology landscape includes notable examples of lean-team success. Some of AI’s biggest names have built upon tiny teams, such as Anysphere, the maker of coding copilot Cursor, which grew from $1 million to $100 million in annual recurring revenue in less than a year with fewer than 50 employees, according to data from private market research.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted last year that “we’re going to see 10-person companies with billion-dollar valuations pretty soon.” Even within large organizations, software development sometimes thrives in small, focused groups. Meta’s superintelligence AI unit, for instance, is led by a handful of star researchers despite Meta’s total workforce exceeding 70,000 employees.
Finding the Right Balance
The debate reflects a broader tension in technology development between efficiency and innovation. While lean teams can move quickly and conserve resources, Stein’s comments suggest that the current extreme application of this philosophy might be costing companies transformative breakthroughs.
As vice president at one of the world’s most influential tech companies, Stein brings substantial credibility to this discussion. His perspective challenges the prevailing wisdom that smaller is always better, particularly for startup companies and established tech giants alike.
The optimal approach likely lies in recognizing that different types of innovation require different team structures and investment levels. Some products thrive with minimal teams, while genuine technological breakthroughs often demand the scale and patience that Stein advocates.
