<story><title>Independence, autonomy, and too many small teams</title><url>https://kislayverma.com/organizations/independence-autonomy-and-too-many-small-teams/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>redredrobot</author><text>I worked at Amazon on two-pizza teams. I never thought the two pizza team was about reducing communication, but more allowing faster independent decision making. Once you work on something that is big and complicated enough that it requires dozens of engineers, there HAS to be communication and coordination. Hopefully you have good managers (and high level ICs) because they are supposed to do a lot of the coordination so that it is easy for the engineering team to focus on engineering. A goal of independent two-pizza teams is to have the independent teams define how their individual pieces will interface and then the small teams can independently decide on implementation details.&lt;p&gt;The two-pizza team concept is also about having a heuristic that tells you when to start looking into how to divide responsibilities between independent teams.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t really get what this article is proposing. Never work on projects complicated enough to require lots of engineers and thus coordination? It is not realistic to deliver the complex projects that big companies need to do with a single small team doing everything. It will just never get delivered.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pdelgallego</author><text>The Two-pizza team concept is a very small part on how Amazon works. A few others on top of my head.&lt;p&gt;- Enable high-velocity decision making: Defining clear tenets that act as the north start for decision making at team level, and two-way doors thinking.&lt;p&gt;- Establish how you measure success, and how does relate to the goals of the organisation.&lt;p&gt;- Achieve team independency is a key factor, and having strong  mechanisms such as the &amp;quot;away teams&amp;quot; concept,  &amp;quot;communication is terrible&amp;quot; mental model and reducing cognitive overload by relying on platform teams&lt;p&gt;- Nominating a single-threaded owner for programs and business outcomes.&lt;p&gt;- Articulate how the organisation works across teams using mechanisms such as bar raisers, OP1&amp;#x2F;OP2, PR&amp;#x2F;FAQs, CoEs, WBRs, experiment-driven teams, ...</text></comment>
<story><title>Independence, autonomy, and too many small teams</title><url>https://kislayverma.com/organizations/independence-autonomy-and-too-many-small-teams/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>redredrobot</author><text>I worked at Amazon on two-pizza teams. I never thought the two pizza team was about reducing communication, but more allowing faster independent decision making. Once you work on something that is big and complicated enough that it requires dozens of engineers, there HAS to be communication and coordination. Hopefully you have good managers (and high level ICs) because they are supposed to do a lot of the coordination so that it is easy for the engineering team to focus on engineering. A goal of independent two-pizza teams is to have the independent teams define how their individual pieces will interface and then the small teams can independently decide on implementation details.&lt;p&gt;The two-pizza team concept is also about having a heuristic that tells you when to start looking into how to divide responsibilities between independent teams.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t really get what this article is proposing. Never work on projects complicated enough to require lots of engineers and thus coordination? It is not realistic to deliver the complex projects that big companies need to do with a single small team doing everything. It will just never get delivered.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mytailorisrich</author><text>Yes, it&amp;#x27;s not about reducing communication, it&amp;#x27;s about keeping the number communication channels and coordination manageable.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;two-pizza team&amp;quot; is like a squad&amp;#x2F;section in military organization. It&amp;#x27;s the sweet spot of having enough people to get things but not too many people so that communication and coordination starts to be a problem.</text></comment>