Two-Pizza Teams: Amazon’s Surprisingly Powerful Rule

Amazon was one of the first companies to apply agile working methods on a large scale - without relying on Scrum or other agile frameworks. A core element for agile teams at Amazon was the “Two Pizza Teams” rule.

Amazon’s Two Pizza Teams: Not as Easy as It Seems

The “Two Pizza Team” rule states that a team can only be big enough to be fed with 2 pizzas. Incidentally, the rule comes from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos himself.

Even though decades have passed since the origin of this pizza rule, Amazon is still keeping the “two-pizza team rule” alive. See: Introduction to DevOps on AWS. The idea of small, self-organized teams therefore seems to have a timeless universal validity. 

Even if the idea of small teams sounds simple, there are a few other preconditions that need to be considered in order to be able to exploit the effect of small teams on the agility of the company. 

So let’s take a look at how you can measure and improve this management philosophy and its preconditions in your teams:

Health Check: Amazon Two Pizza Team

The core idea behind the “Two Pizza Teams” rule is that smaller teams can act and react more quickly. This agility is often an important differentiating factor in the development of software in order to remain competitive.

However, for these small teams to actually act faster, a few preconditions need to be met:

• The team has a clear objective and feels completely responsible for achieving it.
  Strictly speaking, a team without a common goal is not a team, but a group of people. If the team does not take responsibility for a clearly defined goal, the team size will not be able to contribute much to agility.
• The team members cover all the necessary skills to achieve their own goals.
  Does your team only consist of people from the same specialist area? That’s not an agile team: Agile teams are cross-functional and have all the roles and skills they need within the team to achieve their goals: Business analysts, product designers, developers, etc. The composition should always match the team goal.
• The team has all decision-making powers and resources and is therefore not dependent on third parties to achieve our goals.
  If the team is heavily dependent on other teams or decision-makers, this nips any agility in the bud. The team must be able to independently try out technologies, generate data for decision-making and obtain direct customer feedback.
• The team has direct access to customers in order to obtain customer feedback.
  If a two-pizza team simply works through a backlog without having any customer contact, this is only promising to a limited extent. For your organization to really become more agile as a whole, each team must have direct access to its own customers in order to receive and respond to customer feedback without detours.
  See also: Amazon’s principle of customer obsession

So before you run off to downsize your teams, you should definitely take care of these preconditions. A good workshop format to check this “Two Pizza Health Check” is the following retrospective:

Amazon Two Pizza Team Retrospective

With this Two Pizza Team Retrospective, you can examine the preconditions together with your team and initiate further development:

How to

Amazon Two Pizza Team Health Check: How the retro works

1. Random Icebreaker (2-5 minutes)

   Echometer provides you with a generator for random check-in questions.

2. Review of open actions (2-5 minutes)

   Before starting with new topics, you should talk about what has become of the measures from past retrospectives to check their effectiveness. Echometer automatically lists all open action items from past retros.

3. Health Check

   All team members can answer the health checks anonymously on a scale. Then go through the results of the health checks together and record any additional comments if necessary. If you use the same health checks in several retrospectives, you can also track trends over time in Echometer.

   • We have a clear team goal for which we take full responsibility.
   • We have all the skills in the team to achieve our goals.
   • As a team, we have everything we need to achieve our goals independently of third parties.
   • As a team, it is easy for us to gather customer feedback and respond to it.

4. Discuss retro topics

   Use the following open questions to collect your most important findings. First, everyone does it themselves, covered. Echometer allows you to reveal each column of the retro board individually in order to then present and group the feedback.

   • What skills or knowledge do we lack most in the team?
   • In which situations are we as a team dependent on third parties to achieve our goals?
   • What would help us to respond more quickly to customer needs and feedback?

5. Catch-all question (Recommended)

   So that other topics also have a place:

   • What else would you like to talk about in the retro?

6. Prioritization / Voting (5 minutes)

   On the retro board in Echometer, you can easily prioritize the feedback with voting. The voting is of course anonymous.

7. Define actions (10-20 minutes)

   You can create a linked action via the plus symbol on a feedback. Not sure which measure would be the right one? Then open a whiteboard on the topic via the plus symbol instead to brainstorm root causes and possible measures.

8. Checkout / Closing (5 minutes)

   Echometer enables you to collect anonymous feedback from the team on how helpful the retro was. This creates the ROTI score ("Return On Time Invested"), which you can track over time.

Amazon Two Pizza Team Health Check

Health Check Questions (Scale)

We have a clear team goal for which we take full responsibility.

Strongly disagreeStrongly agree

We have all the skills in the team to achieve our goals.

Strongly disagreeStrongly agree

As a team, we have everything we need to achieve our goals independently of third parties.

Strongly disagreeStrongly agree

As a team, it is easy for us to gather customer feedback and respond to it.

Strongly disagreeStrongly agree

Open questions

What skills or knowledge do we lack most in the team?

In which situations are we as a team dependent on third parties to achieve our goals?

What would help us to respond more quickly to customer needs and feedback?

Open this retro nowCustomize...

Conclusion: Amazon’s Two Pizza Team Rule

The Two Pizza Team rule has rightly retained its relevance over the years. However, it is important to note that the size of the team alone is no guarantee of an agile organization.

Only in combination with clear team goals and self-effective teams that can develop solutions in direct customer contact without internal dependencies can an organization reap the benefits of higher customer satisfaction and faster development speed on the market. 

Depending on the company context, it is often not enough to just look at individual teams. As a rule, the organizational structure must also be questioned in order to create the conditions for a high-performance agile company:

To truly become a high-performing agile organization, you must look at your organizational structure differently and be willing to change your mindset and behavior.

Tom Godden, AWS Enterprise Strategist, Source: Amazon Executive Insights

See also in this context: Amazon’s “Day 1 Mentality”

I hope the Two Pizza Team Retrospective can provide an impetus to create these conditions for your team. And perhaps it can also provide some good food for thought at an organizational level!

Bonus: Would you like to learn from other agile pioneers like Netflix?

We also took a close look at Netflix’s culture of innovation and have a few workshop formats for you!

• Why Netflix all results (including failures)
• Netflix has no decision-making processes, but informed captains
• Ideas need to be socialized early at Netflix
• Thinking in bets and testing ideas