A return to two-pizza culture
AWS CEO Matt Garman discusses the company's return to a "two-pizza team" culture, shifting from large, siloed teams to smaller, autonomous groups to restore speed, ownership, and alignment with customer needs after years of rapid expansion.
Background
- **Two-pizza culture** refers to Amazon's principle that a team should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas (ideally 6–10 people). It was coined by Jeff Bezos to avoid bureaucracy and keep teams autonomous and fast-moving.
- This piece, by an Amazon VP, signals that after years of rapid hiring and growing team sizes, the company is deliberately shrinking teams back to that original small-team model.
- The shift is partly a reaction to inefficiencies that came with Amazon's massive expansion (over 1.5M employees globally), and a push to restore the startup-like agility that drove early AWS and retail innovations.
- It's part of a broader internal restructuring under CEO Andy Jassy, who has been streamlining operations, cutting management layers, and requiring staff to return to the office five days a week.