
Amazon’s “two-pizza teams”: The ultimate divisional organization (2013) - tosh
https://jasoncrawford.org/two-pizza-teams
======
lostmyoldone
With those team sizes, those pizza must either be huge, or Amazon is
ridiculously "frugal", or less politely: cheap.

But it sure explains a lot. I never understood how AWS could both work
reasonably well, and simultaneously be such an utter mess when it comes to how
configuration looks, how the console UI acts, etc.

However, if the teams actually are as loosely coupled as claimed, valued
accordingly with 2 pizzas for an up to 10 person team. If they then more or
less all of them all have their own "P&L", then that's exactly what one would
expect. Everyone doing what's necessary for their individual P&L, trying to
avoid taking on any additional responsibility. Overarching concerns, and
aspects mostly existing in the interface between teams will almost certainly
be either ignored completely, or only given the very least amount effort
necessary to keep up appearances.

~~~
tantalor
> Two-pizza teams are so named because they’re small: 6 to 10 people

That sounds about right to me. How much pizza are you eating?

~~~
majewsky
When I go to an Italian restaurant, I eat a whole pizza by myself. Size is
roughly 30cm diameter. I can only assume that those two-pizza-team pizzas are
either ginormous, or they're those American-style pizzas where eating more
than 2 slices gives you an immediate heart attack.

~~~
tantalor
You can safely assume since Amazon is a US company we're talking about US
pizzas, where a single pizza serves 3-5 people. Also, it's typical with
American pizza to serve sides such as salad, garlic bread, pasta, fries, etc.
and beverages, dessert so "2 pizza" can be read as "2 pizza plus usual sides".

> Domino’s large pizzas are the perfect answer to feeding a hungry group.
> These 14-inch pizzas feed approximately three to five people

[https://www.dominos.com/en/about-
pizza/sizes/large/](https://www.dominos.com/en/about-pizza/sizes/large/)

~~~
wolco
Never seen a single pizza feed 5 people where someone did not need to stop at
McD on the way back home.

------
ukj
It's the SoC principle[1] applied to organisational design. It faces the same
challenges as it does in software - strong/weak coupling. Leaky abstractions.
Duplicate functionality. Hotspots.

It gets complex for all the same reasons too. Orchestration, communication,
synchronisation, locking, race conditions, Byzantine failures.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns)

~~~
darkerside
Hotspots? That's a new one for me

~~~
ukj
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_spot_(computer_programming...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_spot_\(computer_programming\))

------
test6554
I have trained for years to expand my stomach enough to become my own two
pizza team.

~~~
VikingCoder
One of my favorite memes:

Every pizza is a personal pizza if you try hard and believe in yourself.

~~~
bigwavedave
And "if it doesn't come in a resealable package, it's meant as a single
serving."

------
lliamander
I worked at HP after it had adopted the "functional" structure. I remember old
timers who attribute the decline of HP (at least in part) to the abandonment
of the divisional structure, which had been quite strong in the company.

I would hazard a guess that most tech companies that undergo such a transition
likewise eventually suffer the same fate.

~~~
Traster
I have no real justification for this, but companies have a natural culture.
One of the signs of a failing company is trying to adopt someone else's
culture. So whilst Functional structures might work for some companies, if you
work in a divisional company and management decides to make you "Functional"
that sounds like a red flag to me.

------
pbhjpbhj
Presumably there's a supervisor layer that looks for negative interactions?
Like if you're optimising for picking rate and the facilities 2PT is
optimising for energy saving then their change in facility temperature could
be impacting your picking rate leading to overall poorer outcomes.

I've just started with AI/ML but the use of "fitness function" suggests the
model here was a company as an AI.

Presumably they also have multiple 2PT with the same fitness functions so they
can do "genetic" selection?

------
kator
I've been at Amazon for 1 year, 8 months and 21 days (thank you Phonetool).

I'm a product manager, my career history is long and varied including 25 years
of running my own companies. I was at first very concerned about the Two Pizza
team concept, who's in charge, how do we optimize the application of people to
effort? Being a programmer I had always looked to manage the separation of
concerns in my designs. I just hadn't thought about it in the real world as a
pattern that could work. To me, Amazon is a massive open-source project with
many teams focused deeply on a handful of topics. We share data very openly,
we share learnings, we share what we're planning to do and ask for input.

My opinion is that somewhere in the history of Amazon the executive team must
have realized they could not make all the decisions, that they would become
the bottleneck for growth. So instead of focusing on command and control as
many companies have done, they focused on how to hire leaders and teach them
to think critically, take risks, learn and improve. Amazon values seeking
truth and if it's not fully known then where it makes sense take risks to
learn and improve the known truth. If you read about our leadership
principles[1] you'll see that they're in tension with each other, they're
designed to make you think, the answer isn't given to you, the way you come to
answers is taught instead. An example, Dive Deep vs Bias for Action, when do
you stop digging into the problem and just take action? This tension helps you
think about decisions you make that impact the outcome for our customers.

Another thing that often gets overlooked is the concept of "Single Threaded
Owner". I'm an STO on a topic, that means I write and communicate the known
truth and our strategy and plans, I participate in discussions around that
topic, I talk to customers about it, I read industry news and leverage my own
experience in that topic. Others know me as that STO and reach out to me with
related topics if something makes sense to me in my topic area then I try to
address it, if not I connect the person with another STO I think would be
interested in their idea or problem. Success at Amazon is deeply driven by
networking, we have an internal tool called Phonetool which allows you to
quickly navigate the company and find people who are close to the topic you
have in mind. I keep thinking it's like the six degrees of separation concept,
if somebody doesn't know the topic they know someone who is closer to the
topic, within a couple of emails you are in a conversation with someone on the
other side of the company who is passionate, fired up and knows more about the
topic than you thought could be known. They're excited to talk to you about
their topic and teach you or learn from your new idea related to their area of
focus.

When I first started someone told me "Don't worry if other people seem to be
doing the same thing, over time the best effort will return results and the
other ideas will fade and those people will find new ideas to chase". I've
heard it said we would rather have two people working on a thing than none.
This is a path to discovery. Amazon is very data-driven when you make a
statement without data you had best be ready to debate it and explain why that
is your position. I myself have a long career and sometimes I just have to say
"because I've done it, been there done that". Which is fine but its also
awesome when you can show data. I identified a pattern that was unhealthy
based on my own experience, my team came up with some metrics we could collect
to quantify the issue. Now we're sharing those metrics and people all around
my team are rallying around the problem.

In my career, I've run my own companies, been in start-ups that raised money,
sold companies to other companies and just about everything else you can
imagine. This is the closest to feeling like a startup but with the resources
to create great outcomes for customers at scale. It has its challenges as do
all companies of more than one person, but many of the challenges are
different than I've seen in the past. When in doubt you can always raise a
leadership principle and everyone will jump in and talk about how that would
apply to the situation we're dealing with. That's unique for me thus far in my
career most companies I've worked for have their "values" painted on the walls
and that's about as far as they go. I was at a startup where we tried to be
very deliberate about our values but this is deeper, cuts across the entire
org and everyone is passionate about discussing what they mean for them and
how they apply them to their work.

To me what is most important in my career is learning and doing it with great
people, so far I've got lots of both of those things applied to problems at a
scale I wouldn't have in other companies.

[1]
[https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles](https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles)

~~~
mcnichol
> Success at Amazon is deeply driven by networking

I've seen this at other places. It created toxic politics and divisive
cliques.

Without dragging it out too much, I'd think there needs to be a high level of
accountability that can overpower strong consensus around low sources of truth
and group think.

It would be great (and appreciated) to hear any opinions you have on this
topic.

~~~
kator
The decisions aren't made by the network. Decisions are driven by knowledge
and data and a sense for how we are able to provide the best possible customer
outcome.

It's not a "who you know.." sort of environment, but networking will make you
more productive because somewhere, on planet earth, someone at Amazon, is
thinking about that thing, you just thought of, and they're going to be super
excited to compare notes and ideate with you!

------
chiefalchemist
> 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.

Let take it a step further and say it's about human nature. That is,
individuals consider themselves as such in a small group. That is they feel
personal accountability.

However, as the group grows your perception of where to place accountability
shifts to the whole. Thwn group think kicks in and the value of collaboration
degrades.

2PT works - at least for Amazon - because it so closely reflects human nature.

~~~
mcnichol
Sounds like you are circling around the idea of Dunbars Number

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number)

------
peterwwillis
Eh. I think the division of the work is only secondary to the quality of its
organization and planning, which is almost always done by one or two core
people on each team, regardless of the team size. Even a 6 or 8 pizza team
could be high-performing if the team members all cooperate very well and have
the same ideas and expectations.

Meetings would take way too long, but who says we need daily meetings, or to
have everyone there for them? You could have a nearly flat hierarchy, and if
all team members took their own initiative to coordinate and perform work in a
way that integrates well, you don't even need N-pizza teams. You just need
people who take initiative.

This is very rare, I think, but it can be taught. If you're the leader of an
organization, focus on teaching people how to be self-organizing, how to care
about a whole product, how to anticipate, ask questions, offer help when it's
not your job, and find alternative solutions to work problems (ex: "they told
us we can't do that" "why?" "I don't know" often has an alternate solution
that just isn't immediately apparent)

------
mindvirus
This seems like a very deliberate model - I imagine that a lot of companies
accidentally end up with a divisional structure just based on how their
company grows.

For those who have experience with this - what are the fitness functions for
common infrastructure - i.e. things that are difficult to tie directly to P&L?
For example, the teams maintaining the logging system or the release flags
service? I would think there are two metrics you'd want to combine in some
way: adoption and then SLOs.

Likewise, on the front-end there is probably a lot of cross cutting work to
present a unified product to the customers - how does that work in this model?

~~~
kthejoker2
If you can convert time into money, everything can be tied to the P&L.

SLOs and time-to-close and telemetry to measure process step times against
milestones can all be converted into a shadow P&L, which you can compare
against actuals.

Time is the only currency anyway.

------
sandGorgon
So this has been abandoned now ? Why is that.

~~~
Dunedan
No, they didn't abandon it. Werner Vogels just last week affirmed that they're
still doing it:

> And we continue to work in two-pizza teams today.

[http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2019/08/modern-
applicati...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2019/08/modern-applications-
at-aws.html)

------
mr_tristan
I wonder how much more Amazon relies on written communication, over verbal.
Even if teams are independent, they do interact with other Amazon teams,
right? While there's always social value in some verbal and face-to-face time,
it seems like if groups are independent, teams are gonna have to get good at
writing things down, to avoid the madhouse.

I could have sworn I've read Amazon is notable for written communication, but
I can't seem to quickly find the source. This seems like an important
component of making small, independent teams work.

~~~
jasoncrawford
Yes, in particular, Amazon is notable for using written documents instead of
slides: [https://slab.com/blog/jeff-bezos-writing-management-
strategy...](https://slab.com/blog/jeff-bezos-writing-management-strategy/)

And for their funny habit of reading the document _in_ the meeting (Bezos
calls it “study hall”): [https://jasoncrawford.org/the-silent-reading-
technique](https://jasoncrawford.org/the-silent-reading-technique)

But of course there's lots of spoken communication as well.

------
0x445442
I think 6 to 10 is even be too large for most projects depending on how those
people are allocated. If the project has go to people for certain areas of the
project like configuration management, CI/CD, BDD test implementation or front
end development then that size seems reasonable. But if each developer is
expected to do everything then I'd say 4 to 5 person teams would be the max
you'd want.

When teams grow beyond 4/5 the context of responsibility and interface surface
area is usually too large for them to be fully locked in.

~~~
jsjohnst
Maybe it’s an artifact of the places I’ve worked, but I’ve generally seen top
performing teams usually have the following structure:

2 FE + Lead,

2 BE + Lead,

FE & BE QA (usually need both),

Designer (sometimes shared, but usually becomes a bottle neck if so)

PM/PjM/Manager (might be one or more people filling these roles)

------
usrlocaletc
How is this different from Virgins' "keep organizations small and break them
up with they get too big" philosophy?

~~~
tantalor
"small" and "too big" are vague and meaningless

~~~
thomaslkjeldsen
Judging from the confusion here, one could argue that the "two-pizza team"
definition is also vague and meaningless - at least to an international
audience.

~~~
true_religion
The two pizzas solution can be easily explained by delivering an American
style pizza and seeing if the team can eat it.

~~~
zinclozenge
I can eat a family sized Papa Murphy's pizza by myself in one sitting so I
don't know how relevant a metric that is.

~~~
freyr
It's not how much pizza you _can_ eat.

Think how many slice a person typically eats at a team lunch in a professional
setting. It's usually a few slices. A large pizza has around 8 slices, so with
two pizzas, that covers 6-10 people. And that's what the article says.

------
KajMagnus
How is this special or unusual in any way, except for the fitness function?
But: "since then, fitness functions themselves have been abandoned". Leaving
... Nothing special?

Aren't all companies divided into smaller teams somehow?

------
amelius
If only the order-pickers got a fair share of those pizzas!

------
glangdale
If I'm part of a team of 6-10 people and you show up with 2 pizzas, I'm likely
going to have to resort to cannibalism.

~~~
dvdbloc
In reality seems more like a 6-10 pizza team... /s

~~~
labawi
How big are your pizzas?

~~~
lultimouomo
Italian pizzas are sized for one person; I think that's true for a large part
of the world.

~~~
TeMPOraL
In Poland, a large pizza will make two people full, and four people each
wishing for "just one more slice".

~~~
Consultant32452
Can we talk diameters? In the US at the big 3 pizza chains a "large" pizza is
approximately 14" in diameter, usually cut into 8 slices. It should satisfy
2-4 adults.

~~~
toyg
It’s not just diameter - Italian pizza is thin and light, American pizza is
deep and heavy. Hence why America moved towards “sharing” formats, because
eating a whole dish is challenging for a single person.

~~~
mc32
There is thin crust vs Chicago deep dish and “Sicilian”. Some thin crus places
are really thin.

There is also the matter of toppings. You can have traditional like four
seasons, margherita, or you can have bbq chicken with eggs and potato topping.

~~~
usrlocaletc
Teams ought to be grouped on the same religious wavelength (for/against)
regarding pineapple and anchovies. Diversity in this respect would be quite
deleterious to morale.

~~~
Consultant32452
I've had "shepherd's pie" pizza before. They used mashed potatoes for the
sauce. It was pretty tasty, but I could _feel_ the carbs.

