Small teams are awesome in so many scenarios. I recently wrapped up a 4-week proof of concept for a client on knowledge management and discovery using NLP.
I was able to work with someone apt at machine learning while I focused on building out the UI and backend. We delivered a first release about 3 days after we started, giving ample time to seek feedback and let the users shape the direction.
In 4 weeks, I was able to create a data mart that had self-healing (we had issues with Python/events missing data which should have reached the existing data warehouse) and the physical data models in it sped up an existing 6 hour ETL task down to 0.15 seconds AND speed up a production query that took 5 seconds per click down to 0.07 seconds.
No team needed or proof of concepts. Actual working data models, up to date tables + ETL code in production.
I was able to work with someone apt at machine learning while I focused on building out the UI and backend. We delivered a first release about 3 days after we started, giving ample time to seek feedback and let the users shape the direction.