Team scaling (Brooks's law) API

Estimate effective team output with a communication-overhead penalty (Brooks's law) — effective = N·output·(1 - overheadPerPair·C(N,2)/N) where pairs grow as N(N-1)/2 — returning effective capacity, efficiency, and the marginal output of the last hire. Answers 'how much does adding people actually add','effective capacity with communication overhead','is this team past diminishing returns','marginal value of the next hire'.

Price$0.01per request

MethodPOST

Route/v1/calc/pm-team-scaling

StatusLive

MIME typeapplication/json

Rate limit120/minute

CacheNo cache

calcpmteamscalingbrooks-lawcapacityoverheadstaffing

API URLhttps://x402.hexl.dev/v1/calc/pm-team-scaling

Integration docs

Example request

{
  "teamSize": 5,
  "outputPerPerson": 10,
  "overheadPerPair": 0.02
}

Example response

{
  "teamSize": 5,
  "outputPerPerson": 10,
  "overheadPerPair": 0.02,
  "communicationPairs": 10,
  "nominalCapacity": 50,
  "effectiveCapacity": 48,
  "efficiency": 0.96,
  "marginalOutputOfLastHire": 9.2,
  "diminishingReturns": false,
  "formula": "effective = N·output·(1 - overheadPerPair·C(N,2)/N)"
}

Input schema

{
  "type": "object",
  "required": [
    "teamSize",
    "outputPerPerson"
  ],
  "properties": {
    "teamSize": {
      "type": "number",
      "description": "Number of people (positive integer)",
      "examples": [
        5
      ]
    },
    "outputPerPerson": {
      "type": "number",
      "description": "Nominal output of one person (points/units)",
      "examples": [
        10
      ]
    },
    "overheadPerPair": {
      "type": "number",
      "description": "Coordination cost per communication pair, 0-1",
      "default": 0.02,
      "examples": [
        0.02
      ]
    }
  }
}

Output schema

{
  "type": "object",
  "additionalProperties": true
}