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Everything at Amazon and AWS is done by two-pizza teams. Everything. Each team is expected to be largely self-supporting. That includes UI, documentation, eve

Everything at Amazon and AWS is done by two-pizza teams. Everything. Each team is expected to be largely self-supporting. That includes UI, documentation, everything. They can leverage the work of other teams, if they choose. Once the product has been created, it is then up to them to get the word out about their product in order to get other teams to use it. So, there is a huge discoverability problem in just finding out what tools exist and what they do. And each team is largely responsible for policing themselves on compliance with standards, or figuring out what best practices are and then adhering to them. So, how many employees does Amazon and AWS have? How many two-pizza teams can you create from those numbers? How many two-pizza teams would you have to have before you start having duplication of effort — or schizophrenic implementation of differing interpretations of standards?

neuroticfish 7y ago
> two-pizza What does this mean? The size of a team that 2 pizzas can feed?
- sethammons 7y ago
  yup, exactly. Which can vary wildly. I used to eat a pizza by myself, and now I limit myself to two slices. And a guy on my team does not like pizza. I find it better to just say 5-9 members.
ai_ia 7y ago
>How many two-pizza teams would you have to have before you start having duplication of effort — or schizophrenic implementation of differing interpretations of standards? Steve Yegge wrote a rant on Amazon[1] which paints a different picture of Amazon documentation culture inside the company. Even though they have a large number of teams, they seem to have well defined standard for API Documentation as far as my understanding. [1] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611