Small teams move faster because of what they don't have to do — not because they work harder.
A ten-person team without a change-approval board isn't disorganized — it's optimized for a different failure mode.
Large organizations trade velocity for predictability at scale. A boutique engineering studio trades some of that predictability back for velocity, and structures its process (code review, static analysis, staged rollouts) to catch the risk that trade-off creates.
Know which trade-off you're buying before you sign the SOW.