You're thinking about hiring another developer. But more people might just slow things down further. Here's what's actually causing the bottleneck — and how to fix it.
I've seen this pattern dozens of times: a DTC brand hires developers (or agencies), the team seems constantly busy, but progress is frustratingly slow. Features take months instead of weeks. Bug fixes create new bugs. Everything feels harder than it should.
The instinct is to hire more developers. But that's usually the wrong answer.
The Real Bottlenecks
When development feels slow, the cause is almost never "not enough people." It's usually one or more of these:
Technical Debt Is Eating Your Capacity
When every simple change requires working around years of accumulated shortcuts, bad decisions, and band-aid fixes, developers spend more time on archaeology than on building.
Signs this is your problem:
- Simple changes take unexpectedly long
- Bug fixes frequently cause new bugs
- Developers are afraid to touch certain parts of the codebase
- "We'd need to rewrite that whole thing to do it right"
No Clear Prioritization
When everything is urgent, nothing is. Developers who are constantly context-switching between "urgent" requests lose 20-40% of their productivity to task-switching overhead.
Poor Requirements and Communication
When developers don't clearly understand what they're building, they build the wrong thing. Then they rebuild it. Sometimes multiple times.
Why Hiring More Doesn't Help
Adding developers to a team with these problems usually makes things worse:
- Onboarding overhead — Your existing developers lose productivity training new ones
- Communication complexity — More people means more meetings, more coordination, more miscommunication
- Technical debt compounds faster — More people means more code, more shortcuts, more accumulated problems
- The real problems remain — You're treating symptoms, not causes
Adding developers to a late project makes it later. — Brooks's Law
What Actually Works
Fix the Foundation First
Before adding capacity, address the underlying issues:
- Identify and pay down critical technical debt — The debt that's causing the most daily friction
- Establish clear ownership and prioritization — One person decides what gets built and in what order
- Implement proper specifications — Written requirements, acceptance criteria, design mockups
- Address architecture limitations — Sometimes you need to rebuild parts of the foundation
Protect Development Time
Developers need focused time to be productive:
- Batch interruptions — Designated times for questions and meetings
- Shield developers from stakeholder chaos — One person filters and prioritizes requests
- Reduce meeting load — Most meetings can be async updates
- Plan in sprints — Commit to 2-week chunks of work without changing priorities
The Fractional CTO Role
This is exactly where a fractional CTO adds value. You get senior technical leadership to diagnose the real bottlenecks, create prioritization frameworks, and guide technical debt paydown — without the cost of a full-time executive.