2 pizza teams

April 26th, 2008
[ Office Gossip ]

I like this quote from Jeff Bezos, found link from Mark:

“Communication is terrible.
When Jeff Bezos’s people said they needed to communicate more within the company, he shocked them by shooting back: ‘No, communication is terrible.’ To promote his decentralized vision of the company, he created ‘two-pizza teams’: highly autonomous task forces with five to seven people — no more than can be fed with two pizzas — who innovate and test new features.”

The key for me is the “highly autonomous” part and I’ve seen that overlooked a lot when this approach is tried. Almost every company I’ve worked for has tried some form of 2 pizza teams, however, none have stuck with allowing them to be truly been autonomous. I’d hazard to guess that a highly autonomous 6 pizza team is still better than lipservice autonomous 2 pizza teams.