Stop asking engineers how many machines they need

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Key takeaways:

• Reasonable buffers, stacked across hundreds of teams, inflate total demand massively and untraceably.
• Ask product teams about growth, not machine counts, then translate that automatically into hardware.
• Tying forecasts to durable products and not projects cuts the process from months to about a month.

Every large technology company eventually faces the same challenge. When the company is still small, with maybe a few hundred engineers and a handful of services, capacity planning is a simple exercise. A few teams make an educated guess, someone plugs it into a spreadsheet, and leadership approves the budget.

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