The Two Pizza Rule

If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large.

(Jeff Bezos)

This rule suggests that regardless of the size of the company, teams should be small enough to be fed by two pizzas. Attributed to Jeff Bezos and Amazon, this belief suggests that large teams are inherently inefficient. This is supported by the fact that as the team size increases linearly, the links between people increases quadratically; thus the cost of coordinating and communicating also grows quadratically. If this cost of coordination is essentially overhead, then smaller teams should be preferred.

The number of links between people can be expressed as n(n-1)/2 where n = number of people.

---