[drakaal]

The author takes the analogy beyond the logical conclusion.

The saying is simply meant to say "there are things that you can't make happen faster than one person can do them".

There are corollaries that we used at Microsoft. "And you can't assign the baby to a man" and "She can't have it all on her own."

Taking the analogy farther than one should... Conception is typically a two person activity. But assuming you have a Fertile woman, you can take that 15% that they talk about and up it significantly by trying with 3 different men a day, every day of the month.

So you can "have the baby in 10 months" with enough planning and since you only need each guy for about 5 minutes, you only added 450 Minutes (about 8 man hours) to the process. Less if you stick to 20 days conception can happen.

Bringing that back to Startups/Products: Let's say you have a startup and you are going to build a Server Farm to support it. It used to be you had to order the servers and Dell would take a month to ship them. You can't speed that up. It is a fixed part of the timeline.

Let's say you want to build a new Electric car, the government testing for crash and safety takes a fixed amount of time you can't speed that up.

The analogy is not just about can you speed something up by putting more people on it, it is meant as a lesson that some processes are beyond your control.

It is also used as a "build vs. buy" argument. "Apple just released a Feature that we don't have" "Oh, no How long will it take us to build?" "9 months" "That's too long we need this out by end of quarter". How do you do that? You buy someone with that feature and you integrate for 45 days. Just like if your rich uncle announces he has a week to live, and each Grand Nephew (I think that is the kid of your Niece or Nephew) will inherit an equal split of his Billion Dollars, so you need a baby tomorrow. You can't try to get your girlfriend pregnant, that won't work in a week. Your only option is to buy or steal a baby.