A return to two-pizza culture
AWS CEO Matt Garman announced a return to the "two-pizza team" culture, restructuring the organization into smaller, more autonomous teams with fewer than 100 people. The move aims to reduce overhead, simplify decision-making, and restore the speed and agility the company had in its early days.
Background
- **"Two-pizza team"** is a famous Amazon principle (popularized by Jeff Bezos) stating that a team should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas — roughly 6-10 people. The idea is that small teams move faster, communicate better, and stay accountable.
- Amazon is now publicly calling for a **return** to this culture, acknowledging that during its massive post-2020 hiring spree, team sizes grew unwieldy, coordination overhead ballooned, and decision-making slowed.
- The piece signals an internal **reorganization and cultural reset** at Amazon, likely involving breaking up larger groups, flattening management layers, and re-emphasizing the "Day 1" startup ethos that the company has long claimed but struggled to maintain at its current scale (~1.5M employees).
- This matters because Amazon's operational practices (e.g., the two-pizza rule, written memos over slide decks, the "6-pager" meeting format) have influenced how countless other tech companies structure engineering and product teams. A course correction at Amazon often ripples through the broader industry.