This is not an article about what a tech team looks like.

I want to start by talking about what a World of Warcraft raid team looks like.

I used to be a guild raid leader in WoW. I’ve led teams that could only clear Heroic, and I’ve led teams that earned Cutting Edge. For those unfamiliar: a raid is where 20 to 30 “internet strangers” gather three nights a week, three hours a night, trying to beat one or more brutally difficult bosses.

How difficult? If a single person loses focus for three seconds, the entire attempt can wipe.

Each fight lasts 6 to 10 minutes. Everyone’s assignments feel like juggling on a unicycle — you’re tracking two or three mechanics simultaneously, executing your damage rotation, and not dying. All at once.

I hope this gives you a rough sense of the scale: clearing a 6-to-12-boss raid tier is at least as hard as delivering a small-to-medium software project.

And here’s what I eventually learned: the hardest part of a team isn’t strategy or tooling. It’s people.

A team is never made up of people with perfectly aligned goals, perfectly equal commitment, perfectly matched ability. It’s usually a temporary assembly: a handful of idealists, a batch of steady operators, and some people with looser attachments.

Managing a team, at its core, is about getting these people to briefly pull in the same direction.

What a Raid Leader Actually Does

As the raid leader, your job is to guide the team to the current tier’s goal.

That means you’re responsible for everything: managing recruitment, designing tactics, maintaining team morale, doing post-fight data analysis, picking the roster and bench for each boss, mediating conflicts, and establishing the right rules and norms.

Nobody is truly ready when they become a raid leader. I wasn’t either.

I had no management experience, and honestly, I didn’t want the responsibility. But when my guild’s previous raid leader quit, I felt someone needed to step up. So I did.

That’s when I realized the role was far more complex than I’d imagined.

Let’s start with tactics.

This part is relatively straightforward. You study other teams’ videos, you focus on the details. As raid leader, you need to understand what every role should be doing at every phase of a fight, so when things go wrong, you can give the right callouts.

You don’t have to micromanage their rotation. But you do need to think about their positioning and uptime.

You think about survival, so you plan healing cooldown timelines based on your healer composition, their spell kits, and available CDs.

There are a lot of moving pieces, but ultimately it comes down to two things: attention to detail, and communication. Get those right, and tactics aren’t the hard part.

The Hard Part Is Getting People to Admit Problems

Details are actually the easy part, because they’re something a raid leader can handle just by putting in the effort.

The real difficulty is communication and team atmosphere.

First off, not everyone takes the initiative to learn what they need to do. Let’s say individual performance is $R_n$, the average performance you need is $P_1$, and the minimum tolerable performance to kill the boss is $P_0$. The raid leader’s job is to help everyone get $R_n > P_0$, while ensuring:

$$\frac{\sum R_n}{n} > P_1$$

This means if someone can’t figure out their rotation, you have to learn it yourself and then teach them. If someone keeps making the same mistake, you need to understand why they keep making it and what it would take for them to stop.

But not everyone can accept their mistakes calmly.

Some won’t admit them. Some can’t. And with some people — well, your mouth is on your face, but their ears are on their head.

When everyone is open and collaborative, the process is actually pretty smooth. But a lot of people get defensive. That’s when your communication skills get tested: how do you get them to lower their guard, feel safe in the team, and actually take feedback?

If someone takes every piece of feedback personally — if they think you’re singling them out — they won’t actually fix anything. They’ll keep making the same mistakes, keep doing their own thing, and eventually start proving that “it’s not my problem.”

So for a team to function, trust is everything.

Think about it: when a friend disagrees with you versus when a stranger disagrees with you — which one makes you more defensive? Which one is more likely to trigger shame and irritation?

Team feedback works the same way.

People don’t automatically accept something just because it’s correct. They first need to feel they haven’t been humiliated. They need to feel they still belong to the team. They need to feel that admitting a mistake won’t get them excluded. Only then can they actually hear the feedback.

Sharing your own weaknesses is a good way to close the distance. So is asking for a favor — people tend to feel closer to those they’ve helped. When team members feel they’re in an environment where people look out for each other, need each other, and can rely on each other, they’re far more likely to open up and consider different perspectives.

An open environment matters just as much.

If your officers keep telling members “don’t make suggestions, just do what we say,” people only get more defensive. Ideas don’t vanish because you suppress them — they fester in silence.

You might have good intentions. Your thinking might be well thought-out. But if you don’t maintain an open discussion environment, people will just feel disengaged and disrespected.

A lot of team communication failures aren’t about people not knowing right from wrong. They’re about people not being able to admit they were wrong and still feel safe.

Rules Shape Team Culture

Who fights? Who sits?

Every new boss, this is a headache.

On Mythic difficulty, you can only bring 20 people per boss. And once someone kills any Mythic boss, they’re locked out of other Mythic raids for the rest of the week. If someone sits on the bench, their effective loot is zero.

Of course, as long as someone stays committed to the team, we rotate people through so everyone eventually gets every boss kill.

But every time you bench someone, you can’t predict: will they even show up next week?

That’s why you need a solid team system, especially rewards and penalties.

You need to make sure people who show up — even on the bench — still get something. People with shaky attendance should be at the back of the line for gear.

Rewards and penalties define a team’s culture, because they quietly signal what’s encouraged and what isn’t. Over time, applied across a group, that becomes culture.

By the way — not everyone raids for the same reason.

Some people want gear, so they can push higher Mythic+ keys. Some people want logs — higher parses, bigger numbers on the kill. Some want mounts and transmog. Some want the satisfaction of beating the boss. And some are just here because their friends are here.

So rules alone can’t guarantee retention. As raid leader, the only resources you can actually allocate are the items that drop from bosses. Things like achievement, belonging, friendship — you can influence those, but you can’t fully control them.

Teams Are Usually Made of Three Kinds of People

A team can rarely be assembled entirely from aligned idealists.

But without idealists — who would be “dumb” enough to pour everything into trying to build a team that can actually hit its goals?

In a 20-person Mythic raid team, you typically have 5 to 8 core members. Their goals and ideals are aligned.

These people aren’t necessarily more skilled than everyone else, but they have extremely high initiative. When the team hits problems, they’ll sacrifice personal gains to keep things moving, or try to carry more weight themselves.

The more of these people you have, the better. If the entire roster were like this, progression would be buttery smooth.

Next, you have 5 to 8 high-performing members.

These are people who either think your team is reliable and want a stable place to get gear, or were introduced by friends of the core members. They won’t proactively take on responsibility, and their initiative isn’t necessarily strong — but they communicate well, their skills are solid, and they complete whatever you assign them.

But when the team is genuinely in trouble — like a roster crisis — they won’t really go all-in to help. They’ll look for another guild.

Finally, you have about 5 to 8 fringe members.

These people might show up once or twice. Their skill level and initiative are lower. They’re not bad people, and they’re not necessarily toxic. More objectively: their connection to the team’s goals is weaker, their investment is lower, and they’re more likely to treat this as a one-off arrangement.

They’re the team’s weak points. You generally avoid giving them special assignments unless absolutely necessary — you just hope they do their basic job.

They’re the closest thing to “mercenaries.” Bench them once or twice, and they might never come back.

But as raid leader, you can’t outright reject them, because you need bodies to keep running. These are also the people most likely to get defensive, most likely to have communication issues. Not because they’re inherently worse, but because the trust between them and the team is thinner to begin with.

Software Teams Are the Same

I’ve been talking about WoW this whole time, but what I actually want to talk about is software engineering teams.

WoW guilds look like a game, but the problems they surface are remarkably similar to software teams: people differ not just in ability, but in commitment. Everyone on the team has a different understanding of the goal, a different willingness to shoulder responsibility, a different capacity to absorb feedback.

A typical software team today is about 8 to 12 people, occasionally with 1 or 2 interns. Different headcounts, different work — but the core dynamics are the same.

You still need smooth communication, trust, reward systems, and different types of members.

I’ve never been a manager. From my personal experience, I’d love for everyone to trust each other, work in an open environment, operate under fair incentives, with as many responsible members as possible.

But software engineering is still engineering. You need warm bodies to stack.

I can imagine, as a hiring manager, you can’t expect all 12 people you hire to be that first type — the idealists. Sometimes, for the timeline, you need the third type too.

This isn’t a moral judgment. It’s organizational reality.

The real question is: do we still need teams that big?

AI Makes Small Teams Possible Again

For a long time, I’ve been deeply annoyed that Mythic raiding is hard-locked to 20 people.

Because finding 8 committed, responsible people is doable. Finding 20 is not. And on top of that, communication overhead grows fast with headcount. As raid leader, you simply can’t manage that many.

Same thing in software engineering.

One of the biggest time sinks at work is alignment meetings. Some meetings, the host hasn’t prepared at all. Some could have been a document. Some important meetings have people present who might as well not be — all of it is wasted time.

What’s worse: everyone’s cognitive speed and thinking style are different. I’m not talking about technical skill — I’m talking about how fast people understand problems, abstract them, and sync on context.

With fewer people, it’s easier to find a minimal shared model everyone can grasp.

Jeff Bezos has the two-pizza team theory: a team shouldn’t be bigger than what two pizzas can feed.

But I think, especially with AI, two pizzas might already be too many. One pizza might be enough.

The problem with large teams isn’t the number of people itself — it’s that alignment costs eat up enormous energy. And AI doesn’t just replace “people” — it replaces a chunk of execution cost, coordination overhead, and boilerplate work.

If AI can take on more of the mechanical implementation, exploration, and organization work, then the scarcest resource on a team stops being headcount. It becomes people with high trust, high initiative, and high judgment.

Last weekend, while I was tinkering with my home AI setup — building household apps with it — I caught myself thinking: if HR asked me, “Do you want 12 headcount, or 10 headcount plus unlimited tokens?”, I’d probably choose the latter without hesitation.

Then I thought: what about 12 headcount versus 6 headcount plus tokens?

I sat with that one. Still the latter.

Because it’s easier to find that many reliable people at the smaller number. That means less alignment, faster team decisions, faster scaling.

Teams need a high bar to enter and an open door to leave.

If we believe in what we’re building, then believing in that vision and choosing to dedicate yourself to it should be a privilege. And people who don’t want to stay — don’t force them. They won’t bring positive output to the team. Worse, they’ll drain the people who actually want to push forward.

I’m genuinely excited about this AI wave.

Because I feel like it’s giving every idealist a shot.