Two-Pizza Team

Amazon rule to keep teams as Small Teams.

Jul'2013, Jason Crawford: Amazon's “two-pizza teams”: The ultimate divisional organization model. They aren’t about team size—they’re about autonomy and accountability.

• cf Agile Squad, Agility, Context, and Team Agency

Amazon took divisional structure organization models to the extreme with two-pizza teams (2PTs, for short).

Two-pizza teams are so named because they’re small: 6 to 10 people; you can feed them with two pizzas. The most important aspect of a 2PT isn’t its size, though, but its fitness function. A fitness function is a single key business metric that the senior executive team (the “S-team”) agrees on with the team lead. (North Star Metric)

Once approved, the team is then free to execute relatively autonomously to maximize its fitness function

there’s no need to coordinate even across teams, let alone across divisions, to get something done

A handful of engineers, a technical product manager or two, and maybe a designer all report directly to the 2PT lead (or “2PTL”). (TeamLead)

The 2PTL job is similar in character to being general manager of a division—just as a GM is like a CEO of a product within a company, a 2PTL is like the CEO of narrower function

Epilogue: This post describes Amazon as I knew it when I worked there 2004–2007. People who were there more recently tell me that since then, fitness functions themselves have been abandoned, although the ideas of accountability, autonomy and ownership are still core and very strong.