David Risher spent six years at Amazon, the last three as senior vice president for marketing. In 2004 he told the journalist Alan Deutschman about one of Jeff Bezos’s more memorable moments, at an off-site retreat.
“People were saying that groups needed to communicate more. Jeff got up and said, ‘No, communication is terrible!’”
The managers were shocked. But Bezos kept pushing the idea, as Deutschman put it, of “a decentralized, disentangled company where small groups can innovate and test their visions independently of everyone else.” The rule that came out of it was easy to remember. If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large. Fast Company worked that out as five to seven people, “depending on their appetites.”
Jason Crawford joined Amazon the year that article ran and stayed until 2007. Writing about it in 2013, he put the size at six to ten. And he said almost everyone missed the point: the teams “aren’t about team size.” In his words, “they’re about autonomy and accountability.”
What mattered most, by his account, was each team’s “fitness function.” This was a single business metric that the team lead agreed with the senior executive team, known inside Amazon as the S-team. On his search-marketing team it was literally a profit figure: the contribution profit from sales that came through sponsored links, minus what the clicks cost. Teams that built software for the warehouses were measured on how efficiently items were picked, packed and sorted.
Once the metric was agreed, the team was free to chase it its own way and set its own priorities. A handful of engineers, a technical product manager or two and perhaps a designer all reported to the team lead. As Crawford describes it, there was “no need to coordinate even across teams, let alone across divisions, to get something done.” He called the arrangement “the ultimate divisional organization.”
He added a note at the end. People who had been at Amazon more recently told him the fitness functions themselves had since been abandoned, though the ideas of accountability, autonomy and ownership were still strong.
The pizzas stayed. In 2019 Amazon’s chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, described how the company had broken down its functional hierarchies into “small, autonomous teams, small enough that we could feed each team with only two pizzas.” Each was focused on a specific product, service or feature set. They stopped sharing a single release pipeline, and each team released on its own. “And we continue to work in two-pizza teams today,” he wrote.
AWS’s own page on the idea now says the team is ideally “less than 10 people.” It also says the concept “isn’t solely about size as much as it is about fostering and pushing ownership and independence down to the team level.”