One of the wealthiest people in the world follows a simple rule when it comes to the size of their teams. The principle? Culinary, delicious.
What do two pizzas have to do with productivity? The pizzas are a figurative description of an organizational rule, as Daniel Slater, Global Director of Innovation at Amazon AWS explains. He states this in an article about complexity in a post on a page of his corporation.
We present another, less honorable contribution from a CEO in the following video:
Two Pizzas for a Team
How to determine team sizes like pizzas? According to Slater, Amazon has endeavored under Jeff Bezos during phases of constant growth – and still does today – to form as small teams as possible for individual tasks or services. The “two-pizza principle” has established itself as a guideline. Each team should be able to be satisfied with two delicious culinary dough creations.
How many people are there in a team at Amazon? Slater estimates the size according to this mnemonic to be about ten. There are certainly deviations from this, and he admits that it should naturally not be understood as an inflexible law. But the credo that Amazon follows establishes the aim of setting as small and detailed structures as possible.
Why are small teams advantageous? The more people teams grow, the more complicated the coordination becomes. This costs efficiency in everyday work, makes it difficult to adopt new directions or respond to changing markets. Small teams are theoretically easier to lead and more accurately specialized for specific tasks.
Moreover, according to scientific studies, each person approaches their respective performance optimum as the team gets smaller – see Ringelmann effect.
How are ten people supposed to be satisfied by two pizzas? You are probably wondering how ten people can get up from the table sated after two pizzas. It is just a rule of thumb, and since we are talking about American food culture here, it likely means quite generously topped, large, and also thick pizzas. So at least this rule could make some sense.
Jeff Bezos’ quest for ever more productivity reads like the counter-proposal to the increasingly prevalent concept of regular meetings nowadays. Microsoft has researched how immensely they really interfere in everyday work – and the result is shocking: “Maximum human inefficiency” – Microsoft explains why we achieve so incredibly little work in the office.
