Not really. Managers don't have incentives to grow their team size; they have incentive to deliver. And Amazon is known for 'two pizza teams' anyway.
The parent mentioned 5 teams instead of 2. That's director or higher level decisioning. Which is where you frequently end up having someone far enough away from the actual work that needs to be done, starting early to come up with a roadmap. Given fixed deadline and fixed scope, you lean on your PM triangle knowledge and try to get as much headcount as possible to ensure success, because you don't have enough knowledge yet to really decide at what point adding headcount leads to a negative gain. It's usually less about empire building and more about trying to plan things early rather than growing in response to need.
I've been in this situation, as a manager, being told to hire three teams (two being teams of contractors), pushed back to say I should hire only one (the FTE team) as we didn't have enough work for them, was rebuffed and told I needed to hire (the roadmap said we had the work!), hired, and then had leadership panicking about the fact the teams were idle with nothing to do. After a couple months had enough work we could split it (unnecessarily finely) between them so they could all look active, which lasted about a month before the FTE team just started doing it all, as that was more efficient. I didn't stay there long.
> Not really. Managers don't have incentives to grow their team size; they have incentive to deliver.
This may be true about Amazon but it is not a given in general. Managers can operate in the grey area where they deliver just enough to justify more headcount "in order to deliver more" where the underlying motivation is increasing headcount. Not atypical in political environments like banks etc.
The parent mentioned 5 teams instead of 2. That's director or higher level decisioning. Which is where you frequently end up having someone far enough away from the actual work that needs to be done, starting early to come up with a roadmap. Given fixed deadline and fixed scope, you lean on your PM triangle knowledge and try to get as much headcount as possible to ensure success, because you don't have enough knowledge yet to really decide at what point adding headcount leads to a negative gain. It's usually less about empire building and more about trying to plan things early rather than growing in response to need.
I've been in this situation, as a manager, being told to hire three teams (two being teams of contractors), pushed back to say I should hire only one (the FTE team) as we didn't have enough work for them, was rebuffed and told I needed to hire (the roadmap said we had the work!), hired, and then had leadership panicking about the fact the teams were idle with nothing to do. After a couple months had enough work we could split it (unnecessarily finely) between them so they could all look active, which lasted about a month before the FTE team just started doing it all, as that was more efficient. I didn't stay there long.