Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

Is Your Team Really at Max Capacity? | Sean Kim

22 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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1:11

Cameron Herold uses a marathon analogy to argue that high-performing teams should finish strong with resources left in reserve, not run empty. Sean Kim describes a transparent workload tracking system where engineers and product managers openly share tasks, identify bottlenecks, and use estimations to show how extra capacity can halve project timelines.

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the athlete that finishes the whatever race that they're in or event that they're in, there's, they always have more fuel in the tank at the end of the race, right? You rarely see the marathoner collapse at the finish line and fucking get hauled off to hospital and win at the same time. So how do you know if people are operating at that max capacity? And, and how do you get people to wrap their heads around the fact that we need to get more done with less people faster, right? We need more efficient.
Not everyone would agree with me, but so like my team will tell me directly and be like, hey, I'm busy. We're very transparent about all the work that is on a plate for all engineers and all the PMs. And just having been a PM, I know what it takes to have like multiple complex initiatives going on, working with like, you know, hundreds of engineers. So, you know, when someone says we're busy, we have this roadmap view, and we can say, yeah, you're, you're— instead, like, I need to be able to have another a PM, for instance, so that can move faster. And we did an estimation and say, okay, if you have another PM, you can get this done half the time, whatever, like, or watch this faster, whatever, right? So I think that's where we do that calculation. Okay, let's do the lineage of it.