two-pizza team Concepts

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com

by Richard L. Brandt · 27 Oct 2011 · 222pp · 54,506 words

wanted a decentralized, even disorganized company where people could come up with independent ideas rather than subscribe to groupthink. He ruled the company with the “two-pizza team” concept, that dictated any team should be small enough to feed with two pizzas. Empathy is not something that comes to him naturally. When he

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Cloud (EC2) Electronics Ellison, Larry Employees Bezos interaction with compensation and cult of Amazon expansion (1998) firing (2000) hiring practices individualistic “Just Do It” award two-pizza teams Wal-Mart executives, hiring of work environment Endurance (Lansing) E-Niche Equinet Erwise Everybook Express Lane Farsight Financial status cost-cutting decline (2000) first investors

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais · 16 Sep 2019

role provides the kind of valuable input provided by people in a productivity or tooling team, facilitating and encouraging good practices across teams. The Amazon two-pizza-team model is an example of stream-aligned teams: the teams are substantially independent, have ownership over their services, and have responsibility for the runtime success

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Business Review, May 1, 2009. https://hbr.org/2009/05/why-teams-dont-work. Crawford, Jason. “Amazon’s ‘Two-Pizza Teams’: The Ultimate Divisional Organization.” JasonCrawford.org (blog), July 30, 2013. http://blog.jasoncrawford.org/two-pizza-teams. Cunningham, Ward. “Understand the High Cost of Technical Debt by Ward Cunningham— DZone Agile.” Dzone.com, August 24

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et al., Team of Teams, 94. 3. Rozovsky, “Re:Work—The Five Keys to a Successful Google Team.” 4. Crawford, At opening quotes. “Amazon’s ‘Two-Pizza Teams.’” 5. Dunbar, “Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates,” 469–493. 6. Snowden, “The Rule of 5, 15 & 150;” Dunbar, How Many

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. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow, 265. 3. Lane, “The Secret to Amazon’s Success—Internal APIs;” Hoff, “Amazon Architecture.” 4. Crawford, “Amazon’s ‘Two-Pizza Teams;’” Munns, “Chris Munns, DevOps @ Amazon.” 5. Kramer, “The Biggest Thing Amazon Got Right.” 6. Sussna, Designing Delivery, 148. 7. Pink, Drive, 49. 8. Eckstein, “Architecture

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone · 14 Oct 2013 · 380pp · 118,675 words

idea to the S Team in the basement of his Medina, Washington, home. The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called “two-pizza teams.” Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than ten people—small enough that, when working late, the team members could be fed with

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communication, Bezos hoped, these loosely coupled teams could move faster and get features to customers quicker. There were some head-scratching aspects to Bezos’s two-pizza-team concept. Each group was required to propose its own “fitness function”—a linear equation that it could use to measure its own impact without ambiguity

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. For example, a two-pizza team in charge of sending advertising e-mails to customers might choose for its fitness function the rate at which these messages were opened multiplied by

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basic parts in the hopes that surprising results might emerge. That, at least, was the high-minded goal; the end result was somewhat disappointing. The two-pizza-team concept took root first in engineering, where it was backed by Rick Dalzell, and over the course of several years, it was somewhat inconsistently applied

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like to be executed. Teams ended up spending too much time worrying over their formulas and making them ever more complex and abstract. “Being a two-pizza team was not exactly liberating,” says Kim Rachmeler. “It was actually kind of a pain in the ass. It did not help you get your job

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. Hsieh brought Nick Swinmurn, Michael Moritz, and Alfred Lin, who had just joined Zappos as chairman and chief operating officer. Playing off Amazon’s famous two-pizza-team culture, the Zappos executives served two pizzas, one with pepperoni and one with jalapeño peppers, from a local restaurant. The meeting was brief and awkward

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that small groups of engineers are more effective than larger ones at handling complex software projects. The book lays out the theory behind Amazon’s two-pizza teams. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras (1994). The famous management book about why certain companies succeed

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It

by Brian Dumaine · 11 May 2020 · 411pp · 98,128 words

’s strategy. Bezos concluded the opposite: that bringing everyone up-to-date on a project lengthens its gestation. In 2002, he instituted his now legendary two-pizza teams for software development. Project teams would include no more than ten people, a group small enough that they could be fed by two pizzas. This

Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Workflow

by Dominica Degrandis and Tonianne Demaria · 14 May 2017 · 153pp · 45,721 words

code/outline/plan unexpectedly changes something else. When the local pizza company delivers more than two pizzas to the same meeting room, pay attention. A two-pizza team is a team that can be fed with just two pizzas—about five to seven people depending on the size of the appetite. If three

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two-pizza teams need to have a joint meeting to discuss their dependencies on each other, then you have high coordination costs. Fifteen to twenty-one people bantering

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teams by breaking them down into smaller groups, hidden dangers await if there are unknown dependencies. Cross team communication is hard. When a bunch of two-pizza teams with lots of dependencies between them spend a lot of time coordinating to avoid stepping on each other’s code (due to the merging of

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people. Pizza is frequently delivered to these teams. (Remember the pizza problem from Section 1.2?) They had heard about the success Google had with two-pizza teams, and so this large organization decided it would work for them too. Many stories impacted other teams. They called these stories “away” stories because you

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. It took a long time to finish stories because the experts capable of solving the issues weren’t available when needed. When a bunch of two-pizza teams have a lot of dependencies between them, how much time is spent coordinating? It’s true, we like small teams because they can move fast

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets From Inside Amazon

by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr · 9 Feb 2021 · 302pp · 100,493 words

we’d been operating under was incorrect. Amazon ultimately invented its way around the problem by cutting off dependencies at the source. First Proposed Solution: Two-Pizza Team Seeing that our best short-term solutions would not be enough, Jeff proposed that instead of finding new and better ways to manage our dependencies

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people throughout the company and synthesized them, then came back with a clearly defined model that people would talk about for years to come: the two-pizza team, so named because the teams would be no larger than the number of people that could be adequately fed by two large pizzas. With hundreds

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of these two-pizza teams eventually in place, Rick believed that we would innovate at a dazzling pace. The experiment would begin in the product development organization and, if it

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worked, would spread throughout the rest of the company. He laid out the defining characteristics, workflow, and management as follows. A two-pizza team will: Be small. No more than ten people. Be autonomous. They should have no need to coordinate with other teams to get their work done

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monitored in real time. A team’s real-time score on its fitness function would be displayed on a dashboard next to all the other two-pizza teams’ scores. Be the business owner. The team will own and be responsible for all aspects of its area of focus, including design, technology, and business

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. The team’s work will pay for itself. Be approved in advance by the S-Team. The S-Team must approve the formation of every two-pizza team. As with any major innovation at Amazon, this plan was merely the beginning. Some of its tenets endured, some evolved, and some perished over the

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book. One major effort is worth recounting in some detail, however, because it was both vital and extremely difficult for us to achieve. Just as two-pizza teams replaced a single large organization with something faster and more flexible, a comparable reorganization was overdue for much of the Amazon software architecture to enable

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they need to be pointed in the right direction and have the tools to quickly course-correct when warranted. That’s why, before any proposed two-pizza team was approved, they had to meet with Jeff and their S-Team manager—often more than once—to discuss the team’s composition, charter, and

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a classic example of the Dive Deep leadership principle. I participated in every one of the Fitness Function alignment meetings for the first set of two-pizza teams, which owned things like Forecasting, Customer Reviews, and Customer Service Tools. We questioned every metric from every angle, probing how those data would be collected

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, they also built up trust between Jeff and the new team, reinforcing their autonomy—and therefore their velocity. We started with a small number of two-pizza teams so that we could learn what worked and refine the model before widespread adoption. One significant lesson became clear fairly early: each team started out

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did so, but once they had removed dependencies, built their fitness function, and instrumented their systems, they became a strong example of how fast a two-pizza team could innovate and deliver results. They became advocates of this new way of working. Other teams, however, put off doing the unglamorous work of removing

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to make some satisfying early progress. Their dependencies remained, however, and the continuing drag soon became apparent as the teams lost momentum. A well-instrumented two-pizza team had another powerful benefit. They were better at course correcting—detecting and fixing mistakes as they arose. In the 2016 shareholder letter, even though he

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wasn’t explicitly talking about two-pizza teams, Jeff suggested that “most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90

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realize that other limits to autonomy would also need to remain, with each team still tied to others by varying levels of dependency. While each two-pizza team crafted its own product vision and development roadmap, unavoidable dependencies could arise in the form of cross-functional projects or top-down initiatives that spanned

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multiple teams. For example, a two-pizza team working on picking algorithms for the fulfillment centers might also be called upon to add support for robotics being implemented to move products around the

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teams, for example, had to be involved in almost every new initiative, even though it wasn’t in their original charters. Some Challenges Still Remained Two-pizza teams were a much-talked-about topic at Amazon, but as originally defined, they didn’t spread throughout the company as completely as some other new

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to improve the way Amazon worked, they also exhibited some shortcomings that limited their success and broader applicability. Two-Pizza Teams Worked Best in Product Development We weren’t sure how far to take the two-pizza team concept, and at the beginning it was planned solely as a reorganization of product development. Seeing its early

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those areas did not suffer from the tangled dependencies that had hampered Amazon product development. Therefore, implementing two-pizza teams in those orgs would not increase speed. Fitness Functions Were Actually Worse Than Their Component Metrics Two-pizza teams had been meant to increase the velocity of product development, with custom-tailored fitness functions serving as

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team would move in the right direction. Combining them into a single, unifying indicator was a very clever idea that simply didn’t work. Great Two-Pizza Team Leaders Proved to Be Rarities The original idea was to create a large number of small teams, each under a solid, multidisciplined, frontline manager and

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few such brilliant managers, they turned out to be notoriously difficult to find in sufficient numbers, even at Amazon. This greatly limited the number of two-pizza teams we could effectively deploy, unless we relaxed the constraint of forcing teams to have direct-line reporting to such rare leaders. We found instead that

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two-pizza teams could also operate successfully in a matrix organization model, where each team member would have a solid-line reporting relationship to a functional manager who

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example, director of software development or director of product management—and a dotted-line reporting relationship to their two-pizza manager. This meant that individual two-pizza team managers could lead successfully even without expertise in every single discipline required on their team. This functional matrix ultimately became the most common structure, though

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each two-pizza team still devised its own strategies for choosing and prioritizing its projects. Sometimes You Need More Than Two Pizzas We all agreed at the outset that

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, and experience to staff and manage a team whose sole focus was to get the job done. Now free of its initial size limits, the two-pizza team clearly needed a new name. Nothing catchy came to mind, so we leaned into our geekdom and chose the computer science term “single-threaded,” meaning

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and discipline to stick with it. We learned as we went, adapting and refining the idea of two-pizza teams until, in the end, we had something far more capable. What was originally known as a two-pizza team leader (2PTL) evolved into what is now known as a single-threaded leader (STL). The STL extends

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the project demands. Today, despite their initial success, few people at Amazon still talk about two-pizza teams. We say that the STL is bigger and better, but better than what? Certainly it’s an improvement on the two-pizza team it evolved from, but is it better than other alternatives too? To answer that question

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leaders and separable, single-threaded teams, and we went through a number of solutions along the way that ultimately didn’t last—like NPIs and two-pizza teams. But it was worth it, because where we landed was an approach to innovation that is so fundamentally sound and adaptable that it survives at

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teams at any company to work autonomously and yet be in sync with the intentions of their leaders. On the organizational side, we used the two-pizza team structure, which allowed our Digital teams to not be dependent on or a distraction to the engineering and business teams running the retail and marketplace

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’s point of view, this meant he wouldn’t be stymied by arbitrating resource conflicts and dependencies at the ground level. He could hold each two-pizza team leader accountable for staffing their team and achieving their goals. Furthermore, he could easily audit whether an important initiative was staffed to succeed. Because the

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publishers, studios, and record companies). Each general manager (GM) category leader had a corresponding peer leader on the engineering side. Each engineering category had a two-pizza team for each major component of the software services (e.g., content ingestion and transformation) and for client application software. This was mostly a pragmatic decision

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had become too broad to break up or divide teams into subteams. A simple example: in 2004, video client application development was handled by one two-pizza team. It then became three teams, one for web, one for mobile devices, one for TV devices. Then the mobile team became four teams (iPhone, Android

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, iPad, Android tablet) and the TV team became five-plus teams (Xbox, PlayStation, TiVo, Sony Bravia, Samsung, etc.), such that by 2011 our original two two-pizza teams were now more than ten. Some of the digital media leaders—including Neil Roseman and Dan Rose—came from inside the company. Others, like Erich

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be great additions to the Amazon digital media team. Since the Mobipocket team consisted of about ten people, they remained in place as an Amazon two-pizza team with a single-threaded focus on Kindle reader client-application development. With the Mobipocket team and their software on board, Gregg, Neil, Felix, and Ian

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1998 Colin joins Amazon 1999 Bill joins Amazon Bar Raiser program launched 2001 Formal Weekly Business Review (WBR) established 2002 Amazon Product API launches First two-pizza teams created 2003 Colin starts as Jeff’s shadow Amazon Web Services (AWS) group is formed 2004 Working Backwards PR/FAQ process formalized Use of PowerPoint

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process OP1 OP2 S-Team goals Anthony, Felix application program interfaces (APIs) Amazon Product API Amazon Seller API definition of dependencies and Green Corp. example two-pizza teams and Are Right, A Lot leadership principle Baker & Taylor Bar Raiser (Amazon’s hiring process) Behavioral Interviewing Debrief/Hiring Meeting diversity and Hire and Develop

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perfection and high standards Press Release/Frequently Asked Questions process and Prime and Prime Video and single-threaded leadership and S-Team and on tenets two-pizza teams and on underpromising and overdelivering Working Backwards and Bezos, MacKenzie. See MacKenzie Scott Bias for Action leadership principle Black Lives Matter movement BlackBerry Blu-ray

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of New Project Initiatives (NPI) and organizational dependencies Press Release/Frequently Asked Questions process and relational database single-threaded leadership and software code technical dependencies two-pizza teams and Digital Media. See Amazon Digital Media disaster meetings Disney Disney+ Dive Deep leadership principle Door Desk Award Dornfest, Rael E Ink Earn Trust leadership

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role compensation as foundational mechanism of Leadership Principles four-hour meetings goals Kindle and members PowerPoint and Prime and single-threaded leadership six-pagers and two-pizza teams and S-Team goals Amazon Digital and annual planning process Dive Deep leadership principle and finance team’s tracking of growth and evolution of high

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. single-threaded leadership being Amazonian and flexibility of size Fulfillment by Amazon and history and origins of rewards of separability and two-pizza teams and See also dependencies; New Project Initiatives (NPI); two-pizza teams (2PTL) Six Sigma six-pager advantages for presenters advantages for readers conducting meetings with FAQ feedback and ideas prioritized over presenters

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Saver Shipping Szkutak, Tom Taylor, Tom technical program managers (TPMs) Think Big leadership principle timeline TiVo Toyota transactional video on demand (TVOD) Tufte, Edward Twitch two-pizza teams (2PTL) Amazon Digital and autonomous teams challenges of characteristics, workflow, and management of course correction and history and origins of Inventory Planning team Mobipocket team

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century

by Jeff Lawson · 12 Jan 2021 · 282pp · 85,658 words

. Engineers were stepping all over each other, and the coordination energy to get anything done was massive. Things were slowing down, so Bezos wrote the “two-pizza team” memo proposing that they divide the company into small teams in order to move faster. (The idea was that you could feed the whole team

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experience. Despite the fact that Amazon seemed to me like a huge company, it felt like a startup. The whole company was divided into small, two-pizza teams, each operating like a tiny startup. There was urgency. There was energy. What we were doing mattered. We were inventing the future—that’s the

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everyone in the company to learn from others but still have a functioning meeting. The goal is to address one of the shortcomings of the “two-pizza team” approach, which is that when you have a large number of small teams (our product side alone has 150 teams) they all start to run

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could interface with each other. This would enable them to move independently, with the relationship between teams formalized in technology. With this one-pager, the “two-pizza team” was born. Rick went back to his leaders and within a week turned Jeff’s initial idea into a six-page workable plan that Amazon

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

by Brad Stone · 10 May 2021 · 569pp · 156,139 words

words, and meticulous consideration by company leaders, most of all from Bezos himself. Meanwhile, working groups inside Amazon were broken into small versatile units, called two-pizza teams (because they were small enough to be fed with two pizzas), and were ordered to move quickly, often in competition with one another. This unusual

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. Meanwhile Bezos approved all these changes and stayed intimately involved, attending product reviews and reading the Friday night compilation of updates from all the various two-pizza teams, and responding with detailed questions or problems that the groups would then have to fix over the weekend. Alexa execs, like leaders elsewhere in Amazon

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confusing for users to phrase commands in the right way to trigger third-party skills and specialized features. The decentralized and chaotic approach of countless two-pizza teams run by single-threaded leaders was manifested in aspects of the product that had become overly complex. Basic tasks, like setting up a device and

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-like atmosphere while the truck sent out text alerts to the smartphones of nearby customers, announcing the item on sale that day. Herrington assembled a two-pizza team to develop the project over the fall of 2014, alongside Prime Now and the private-label push. Though the idea itself was whimsical, the technical

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one delivery to another. Fraud was prevalent, with drivers finding loopholes to get paid for work they didn’t do. One problem was that dueling two-pizza teams in Seattle and Austin worked concurrently on versions of Rabbit for iOS and Android, magnifying the confusion among delivery firms. “All of the things were

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–18, 291, 301, 303, 335, 351, 354–57, 364 third-party sellers on, see Amazon Marketplace transportation networks of, see Amazon transportation networks and logistics two-pizza teams at, 10, 49, 51, 205, 239 2015 as critical year for, 94 Vine program of, 201 Washington Post and, 117–21, 126, 130, 134, 357

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time

by George Berkowski · 3 Sep 2014 · 468pp · 124,573 words

number of simple processes in place to be in a position where your company can weather any kind of hiccups – and continue to scale quickly. Two-Pizza Teams and Internal APIs Amazon’s business model is predicated on the thinnest of margins, and as a result the company has been able to innovate

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most entrepreneurial companies in history. Two reasons Amazon is able to keep its momentum even with 97,000 employees are pizza teams and APIs.1 TWO-PIZZA TEAMS. Jeff Bezos structured Amazon as a decentralised company where small groups can innovate independently and are free from the inherent problems of groupthink. He introduced

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the principle of the two-pizza team. If two pizzas can’t feed a team, then the team is too large. That limits a task force to five to seven people, depending

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funding 419, 421 and getting your app found 147 initial public offering 421 and Instagram 51, 76–7, 79–80 name 110 and virality 281 ‘two-pizza’ teams 374 Uber 6, 36, 87, 89, 333, 350 and attribution for referrals 231 design 131 funding 320, 384, 422 international growth 295, 299–302 name

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

by Tim O'Reilly · 9 Oct 2017 · 561pp · 157,589 words

strong focus on who their customers are, regardless whether they are externally or internally.” Work is done by small teams. (Amazon famously describes these as “two-pizza teams,” that is, teams small enough to be fed by two pizzas.) These teams work independently, starting with a high-level description of what they are

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the team building each function. Kim explained to me that “writing the press release first is a mechanism to make customer obsession concrete.” As are two-pizza teams producing services with hardened APIs. “Amazon does a better job of creating these kinds of mechanisms for its corporate values than any other company I

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, CA: O’Reilly, 2015), 6. 114 “communication is terrible!”: Janet Choi, “The Science Behind Why Jeff Bezos’s Two-Pizza Team Rule Works,” I Done This Blog, September 24, 2014, http://blog.idonethis.com/two-pizza-team/. 115 “both to technology and to the workplace”: Burgess, Thinking in Promises, 1. 116 animated explainer videos: Henrik Kniberg