How We Organize - the two-pizza team and beyond

Amazon is big. Amazon has many teams. Amazon is complex. The same applies to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and this is only one part of Amazon. Landing in my role on October 1st 2018, I learned that Amazon is centered around growth. To sustainably grow, speed, ownership, and customer obsession in action are invaluable.

Expect to read about how I go to know the organizational guidelines and elements of success.

When talking about two-pizza teams, we are talking about American pizzas.

A team that is able to get satisfied with 2 pizzas: a two-pizza team of 6-8 individuals. We're not talking about German pizzas. Two-pizza teams help drive speed and ownership, removes bottlenecks and dependencies. It's a deliberate strategy that fundamentally shapes a way of working. Compact, autonomous units with a complementing skill-set that own their business. What started as a curious concept has become a powerful testament to the principle that smaller, focused teams move and communicate faster and innovate better.

Teams may grow beyond the two-pizza threshold. Communication overhead increases and decision-making velocity decreases. Now its up to the leaders - every individual - to hold true to the the simple guideline and mental models.

Two-pizza teams aren't just about size; they're about maximizing human potential.

Mastering Single-Threaded Leadership, also for yourself.

The concept of single-threaded leadership changed my perspective on focus and accountability. Each leader, each team, owns their business – no divided attention, no competing priorities. This laser focus enables rapid innovation and clear accountability.

Applying this model taught me that true ownership means having both the authority to make decisions and the responsibility for outcomes. This comes with all the up‘s and down‘s to it. Form me, it's a powerful combination that drives both personal growth and business results.

Single-threaded leadership isn't just about focus; it's about enabling decisive action.

Breaking Down Hierarchical Barriers

Amazon's approach to organizational hierarchy challenges traditional corporate structures. The deliberate limitation of management layers isn't about flatness for its own sake – it's about maintaining speed and clarity. Growth and limitation of management are in tension with each other. Decisions have to be made.

Nevertheless, the structure creates direct lines of communication between decision-makers and implementers, fostering an environment where ideas can quickly transform into action. Don‘t forget decision-makers don‘t need to be managers.

Flat hierarchies aren't just about reducing layers; they're about accelerating ideas to impact.

The power of parallel innovation

At Amazon, I've learned to embrace a counterintuitive truth about innovation: sometimes, the path to simplicity starts with calculated redundancy. Amazon often let multiple teams explore similar problems independently, believing that two parallel paths forward trump having no innovation at all (2>0). This isn't inefficiency – it's strategic patience. When different teams tackle similar challenges, they uncover diverse solutions we might have missed with a premature push for standardization. Over time, these parallel streams naturally converge, combining the best insights into unified, robust solutions.

The key is knowing when to let teams explore independently and when to bring solutions together. This dynamic balance between exploration and consolidation has consistently led to stronger innovations and, ultimately, simpler, more effective organizations.

Parallel innovation isn't just about redundancy; it's about embracing the messy reality.

Let's wrap it up.

The beauty of Amazon's organizational principles lies in their simplicity and impact. What I've learned over my journey is that effective organization isn't about complex frameworks or rigid hierarchies – it's about creating the conditions for innovation, speed, and ownership to flourish.

What started as organizational guidelines has become a blueprint for success that transcends Amazon's walls. Whether you're leading a startup or driving change within a global enterprise, these principles offer timeless wisdom: keep teams small and focused, establish clear ownership, minimize bureaucracy, and don't fear parallel paths to innovation. Organization isn't about structure – it's about unleashing human potential to solve customer problems in remarkable ways.

Next up.

How We Work - getting work done