Barrels vs. Ammunition
Every company has two kinds of people. Ammunition: talented people who make work better and faster. Barrels: the rare people who can take an idea from conception all the way to shipping, pulling others along behind them.
Here's the operating insight: your company's throughput is set by the number of barrels, not the amount of ammunition. Five barrels means five real initiatives at once. Hire fifty more great engineers without adding a barrel and you still ship five things, just with more meetings.
You find barrels empirically, not from resumes. Keep widening someone's responsibility until it breaks. Everyone has a ceiling, some people's ceiling is a task, some can run a company. And when you find a barrel, treat them like the scarcest resource you have, because they are.
“If you have five barrels in your company, you can do five things simultaneously. That's it.”
Key idea
Company output scales with the number of barrels, people who can carry an idea from conception to shipping. Find them by expanding responsibility until it stops working.