You have one pizza. You can cut it into 4 slices or 8 slices or 16 slices. But no matter how many times you cut it, you still have the same amount of pizza.
This is how process works at most companies. You can slice the work thinner — more tickets, more subtasks, more checkpoints — but you don't actually create more output. You just create more overhead.
The McDonald's Kitchen
Think about a McDonald's kitchen. One person makes fries. One person makes burgers. The process is obvious. Everyone knows their role. Decisions don't need to be made because the structure makes them for you.
Now imagine fifty people trying to assemble one cheeseburger. Meetings about who holds the bun. Process documents for applying ketchup. Stand-ups to discuss yesterday's lettuce placement. Not because the work got harder, but because the coordination got complicated.
The cheeseburger didn't change. The process around it exploded.
When Process Becomes the Product
There's a tipping point where teams spend more time managing their work than doing their work. More time in meetings about the project than working on the project. More time updating tickets than writing code. More time discussing the process than following it.
When this happens, process has become the product. The team is outputting process, not value. They're very busy — they're just busy with the wrong things.
The Right Amount of Process
The right amount of process is the minimum needed to prevent chaos. For a team of four, that might be a morning conversation and a shared to-do list. For a team of forty, it might be a weekly sync and a simple project board.
The key word is minimum. Start with almost nothing. Add only when something actually breaks. And when you add, treat it as an experiment. If it doesn't clearly help, remove it.
You can't cut the pizza thinner to get more pizza. You can only make sure people are spending their time eating instead of slicing.