The Two-Pizza Rule

In my last post I (re)articulated what I believe to be the fundamental rules of the Agile Org Chart. But I left out something important.

Yes “resources” are people and yes, people work best with other people in stable teams. But this means nothing if the teams are too big.

It’s simple math really. A group of 2 people has 1 line of communication – very easy to manage. 3 people have 3 lines and again this is simple. 7 people have 21 lines of communication and the addition of just 3 more people more than doubles the lines to 46. You can see how things can get complicated and while complex is good, complicated means trouble (as with wine and women).

If we want people to work well together we need to keep team size and communication lines within human limits. The rule of thumb is that teams should have 7 members plus or minus 2. This keeps open lines somewhere between 10 (for a 5-person team) and 36 (for a 9 person team).

The trick is to have teams big enough that they benefit from diversity (e.g. complexity) and small enough that they don’t overwhelm the computing capacity of the individuals.

We call this the Two-Pizza Rule. If you have to buy more than two large pizzas to feed your team lunch the team is either too large … or the team members are.

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Photo By: Subtle Panda

2 Comments to The Two-Pizza Rule

1. 

   Nice post. I’ve heard a similar quote, attributed to Jeff Bezos. Are you aware of it?
Rick Vosper on November 16th, 2011
2. 

   Not aware of it but would love to see it. If you find it please send it my way.
Bob Gower on November 16th, 2011

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