A pattern you'll recognise
In software development, we use design patterns — recurring solutions that someone observed, named, and described in a way that makes them immediately useful. The Gang of Four didn't invent the Observer pattern. They recognised it in existing code, gave it a name, and suddenly teams everywhere had a shared language for something they'd been doing intuitively.
The same thing happens in how organisations operate, but we're much worse at naming those patterns. We see certain dynamics repeat across every company we work with, yet we rarely have precise language for them. The result is that leaders keep rediscovering the same truths from scratch, without the benefit of the pattern library that software engineers take for granted.
Keith Rabois, who helped build PayPal, LinkedIn, and Square, named one of the most important of these patterns. He calls it barrels and ammunition — and once you hear the description, you'll likely recognise it from teams you've worked on.
Ammunition is talented people who can do great work. Barrels are something rarer: people who can take an idea from conception to completion, pull others along with them, and correct course autonomously. They don't just execute — they drive.
Your company can only do as many things simultaneously as you have barrels. Five barrels means five parallel initiatives. Not six. Adding more ammunition to those five barrels might improve the quality or speed of each initiative, but it won't let you do a sixth thing. Only a new barrel unlocks that.
Rabois puts it bluntly: if you are the only barrel in your company and you have fifty engineers, you might as well have ten. The other forty are wasted capacity. They're going to stack up waiting for your approval, your editing, your direction — and they're going to get frustrated. The bottleneck isn't talent. It's the number of people who can independently drive things to completion.
This is why some teams of twelve outperform teams of forty. It's not that the smaller team works harder. It's that they have a higher barrel-to-ammunition ratio, and every person in the setup is being utilised effectively.
How to identify barrels in your organisation
Most organisations have barrels, but they haven't identified them explicitly. That's a problem, because if you don't know who your barrels are, you can't protect their capacity or build around them intentionally.
Rabois offers a deceptively simple method: in an open office, watch who people go to. Not who they report to — who they actually seek out when they need to get unblocked. If you notice that people keep showing up at someone's desk, particularly people who don't even report to them, that's your barrel. That person has become a gravity well — others instinctively recognise that they can help, reframe the problem, and move things forward.
The other way to spot barrels is to test them. Give someone a small scope and expand it until it breaks. Everyone has a ceiling, but some people will surprise you. They'll handle far more complexity than their background suggests. Keep pushing until you find the edge. Where it breaks is the role they should be in. Where it doesn't break — that's your barrel.
Barrels also share a set of recognisable behavioural traits. They take initiative without waiting for permission. They ship high-quality work and keep raising their own bar. They value speed — they get a proof of concept out the door quickly and then iterate. They take ownership of both the plan and the outcome, not just the tasks assigned to them. And they work across boundaries: they can motivate a designer, negotiate scope with a product manager, and align engineering effort — all without formal authority.
If you look at your organisation and can't immediately name your barrels, start paying attention to where people gravitate. The person everyone keeps visiting is almost certainly a barrel, whether they have the title or not.
Steve Jobs described the same pattern decades earlier, in different words. In the mid-1980s, he explained why hiring "professional management" at Apple had failed: "Most of them were bozos. They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything." The people who turned out to be the best leaders were the ones who never wanted to manage — great individual contributors who stepped up because nobody else could do it as well. Jobs was describing barrels before the term existed: people whose authority comes from competence and drive, not from a title or a management methodology.
Organising around your barrels
Barrels are rare. You rarely get full barrel behaviour on day one from the outside — it usually emerges from within your organisation over time, shaped by context, trust, and exposure. The practical question isn't "how do I recruit more barrels?" It's "do I know who my barrels are, and is everything around them set up to maximise their impact?"
That starts with identification. Most organisations have barrels but haven't named them explicitly. Once you do, you can protect their capacity, remove distractions from their path, and make deliberate decisions about what they should and shouldn't own.
Then it becomes a question of ammunition quality. A barrel's output is a function of the people around them. Three highly capable, autonomous people supporting a barrel will generate more throughput than eight average people, because the overhead per person is lower and each one converts more of the barrel's direction into actual output. Every person you add either amplifies or consumes barrel capacity. Both might look similar on a CV. The difference only shows up once they're on the team.
The dynamic also runs in the other direction. Strong ammunition placed alongside a strong barrel doesn't only execute — it's shaped by the proximity. The best developers are made by working alongside other great developers. Who you put around your barrels determines who your next barrels could become.
There's an important nuance here: a barrel at one company may not be a barrel at another. Barrel behaviour is culturally specific. It depends on the environment, the pace, the decision-making style. This means that the ammunition you hire also needs to fit your specific context — not just technically, but in how they work, communicate, and take direction.
In the next article, we'll look at why this equation changes as you scale — and why the quality bar has to rise, not fall, as headcount increases.
