It depends. The threshold will be different based on the complexity of the website, how much work needs to be done, and how your team is organized. For example, you can have lots of non-technical staff writing content, but if all content is funneled through a single content admin to get it into the CMS, that wouldn’t necessarily qualify as large. This scenario may present a bottleneck, but if friction occurs due to your team’s size, it won’t affect the website since most of your writers don’t touch it. Instead, your problems will most likely be process or cultural challenges.

You could also have twenty people, each responsible for a single content type or section of the website. This situation isn’t likely to cause many problems because of team size, even if the total number is considered “large.” Challenges with permission management and access may arise, but that would depend more on the content model, not the team size.

On the flip side, you could have teams distributed across multiple departments, each responsible for its silo of content. This is a common scenario for many industries, including state governments, higher education, and enterprise organizations. Each team could be large, but the overall number of content editors across the entire organization might not be relevant. Each team could also have a different workload, and some departments may publish more content than others. These setups can create process and cultural challenges, but there might also be technological challenges that prevent your teams from putting out their best work.

Some organizations with teams of content producers and editors working together publish a high content volume, following an editorial calendar about as flexible as Han Solo frozen in carbonite. The teams may also practice some type of “create-approve-publish” workflow. This type of setup presents the greatest risk of becoming out of control because mistakes can cascade, bottlenecks can be created, and the workarounds for those bottlenecks could lead to further frustrations and bumping heads.

And then, there are potential translation requirements that build on top of the primary content flow. Do translators count as part of the content team? Again, it depends. Depending on the workflow, translation and internationalization can add a whole new set of problems, from process problems to cultural problems to technological problems.

These examples just touch the surface of possibilities. For the purpose of this eBook, this definition of “large content team” will be used with the caveat that this might not map perfectly to your organization.

A large content team is five or more people working on a single website whose responsibilities overlap and/or whose responsibilities directly depend upon the actions of the other members of the team.

Two people can usually keep things running without being too deliberate. As soon as you add a third wheel, you start to bump into some of these problems, but people can keep stumbling along and keep things working without intentional, crafted solutions. They still interact daily with each other without having to try very hard. As a result, you’ll probably still see a big gain in output. However, once you reach five, the lack of defined processes begins to gum up the machinery of your content pipeline.