Two-Pizza Rule
"If a team can't be fed with two pizzas, it's too big"
Origin: Jeff Bezos at Amazon
The Key Insight
Two-pizza teams work not because small is always better, but because they sit at the sweet spot where coordination costs haven't yet overwhelmed productivity. The real question is how to structure larger organizations as networks of two-pizza teams with minimal interface friction.
What People Think
A practical rule for keeping teams small and agile. Small teams move faster, communicate better, and have clearer ownership.
The Deeper Truth
This is metabolic scaling applied to organizations. In biology, larger organisms have disproportionately lower metabolic rates per unit mass (Kleiber's Law: metabolism scales with mass^0.75). Similarly, larger teams have disproportionately lower output per person due to coordination overhead. The 'two-pizza' size (~6-8 people) happens to be near the inflection point where coordination costs start dominating productivity gains.
Biological Parallel
This maps to foraging group theory. Many social species - from wolves to chimpanzees - form hunting/foraging parties of similar sizes because the coordination benefits peak and then decline. Beyond a certain point, adding members increases competition for resources more than it increases collective capability.
Business Application
The rule works because it implicitly optimizes for communication channels. A team of 7 has 21 potential communication pairs; a team of 15 has 105. But the deeper lesson is about autonomy: two-pizza teams work when they have clear ownership and minimal dependencies. If your 'small' teams constantly need to coordinate with other teams, you haven't actually reduced coordination costs - you've just moved them.
When It Breaks Down
The rule fails for tasks requiring diverse expertise that can't fit in a small team, or for work with high interdependencies that can't be cleanly decomposed. Some problems genuinely require large-scale coordination. The answer isn't always 'smaller teams' - it's understanding when the coordination cost is worth paying.