Steve Blank's heuristic that at very small team sizes — 3, 5, 10 people — formal titles are the last thing a startup needs; premature structure competes with the only thing that matters at that stage, reaching product-market fit.
Practical implication: delay introducing formal roles, reporting lines, and title hierarchies in an early-stage team until the search-for-fit phase is resolved enough to warrant structure. Imposing organizational scaffolding before then is treated as a distraction, not a sign of maturity.