Picture this: your core engineering team—those ride-or-die developers you'd trust with your life—are completely swamped. Launches keep getting pushed back, and your roadmap feels like it's stuck in quicksand. The obvious fix? Hire more people. But here's the catch.
Finding good developers takes forever. Training them? Even longer. You're looking at three to six months before they're actually helping instead of just asking questions. That's where the 1/3-2/3 model comes in handy.
What's This 1/3-2/3 Thing About?
Think of it like this:
Your core 2/3: These are your full-time employees who really get your product, drive the big decisions, and shape your company's DNA. They're the ones making architectural choices that'll either make or break you.
Your flexible 1/3: This is your surge capacity—skilled developers who jump in when things get crazy, clear out backlogs, and handle those specialized projects that pop up. They keep your core team focused on the stuff that really matters.
Why It Actually Works
Simple. Your priorities change constantly. Your roadmap shifts. Funding gets tight or suddenly opens up. Your team needs to roll with these punches, not fight against them.
Here's what it looks like in practice: You've got 15 engineers total. Ten of them are your core people handling strategy, big architectural decisions, and keeping the culture alive. The other five tackle that growing feature backlog, handle urgent client work, or dive deep into performance issues. When priorities shift—and trust me, they always do—you adjust the flexible team, not your core.
What Keeps Engineering Leaders Up at Night
Hiring is a nightmare. Traditional recruiting is slow, expensive, and risky as hell. You're either scrambling to fill gaps or freaking out about runway. Having that embedded third gives you scaling power without the drama of panic layoffs or desperate hiring binges.
Your senior people are drowning. Your principal engineers shouldn't be fixing CSS bugs. They should be designing systems and mentoring junior developers. Embedded roles give them their time back—and their sanity.
Rigid teams miss opportunities. When that big enterprise client wants custom integration next month, or your competitor drops something you need to respond to fast, a rigid org chart becomes your worst enemy. This model means you've got instant capacity when opportunity comes knocking.
Single points of failure are terrifying. Relying only on internal staff puts all your knowledge and progress at risk. With embedded talent, you reduce bottlenecks, cross-train naturally, and keep momentum going even when your tech lead decides to take that dream job right in the middle of a product launch.
Making It Work Without Breaking Things
Start with a skills audit. Go through every role and ask: "Does this person need deep company knowledge to succeed?" Your product managers and tech leads? Probably core. Your front-end developers? Perfect for embedded roles.
Integrate, don't isolate. Embedded team members should feel like teammates, not vendors. Same tools, same meetings, same commitment to quality. The only difference is how they're contracted.
Check in regularly. This isn't something you set up and forget about. Review quarterly: Are the ratios working for your current roadmap? Are you getting the breathing room you need? Markets change—your team structure should adapt too.
Try This Right Now
Open your team chat and count messages from the last week about resource constraints, missed deadlines, or "all-hands-on-deck" situations. If it's more than three, your team is screaming for flexibility.
Then ask yourself:
If you had to change your team size by 30% tomorrow, what would break?
Where is your core team burning energy on work that doesn't need deep company knowledge?
Where could embedded support let them focus on building the future instead of just fighting fires?
Bottom Line
Rigid teams crack under pressure. Flexible ones bend and bounce back stronger. The 1/3-2/3 model isn't just a staffing trick—it's a mindset shift for leaders who get that adaptability is the new competitive edge.