Jess Battison
With companies as big as Amazon, it’s fair to say you’d imagine the CEOs to have various regulations in place to keep things in line and ensure success.
But Jeff Bezos has a pretty specific, and perhaps more obscure-sounding rule for an incredibly smart reason.
Back in the day, before it became the global way of ordering anything and everything you could possibly need online, Amazon was simply a small online bookstore in the US.
And Bezos was getting in early in setting up those in the company for continued success with his ‘two-pizza’ rule.
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At first, you might think this is some kind of metaphor for business plans or something, but it really is just about pizza.
Essentially, Bezos asked that every internal team within the company should be no larger than a group of people able to be fed by two pizzas – so, about five to eight staff members in total.
"We try to create teams that are no larger than can be fed by two pizzas," Bezos explained. "We call that the two-pizza team rule."
You might be wondering what on earth eating pizza has to do with running a business, but the idea of the two-pizza rule isn't about cutting down on food costs or delegating more work to less employees either.
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In fact, it’s that smaller groups of employees are able to work more efficiently as a team.
If implemented properly, Bezos argued the rule would create a more productive and collaborative team, which in turn gives them the edge over competitors when it comes to speed.
"A key factor in enabling constant innovation and speed in a two-pizza team structure is empowering them with a single-threaded focus," Amazon's Web Services page outlining the policy adds.
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This pizza strategy also allows for individual team members to actively contribute to the project, which allows them a greater sense of ownership and empowerment over their work.
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Bezos is also said to apply the same line of thinking to how many people should be in attendance at a meeting.
So no, Jeff Bezos' two-pizza rule does not mean Amazon employees are just sat around in groups scranning on pizza and talking about the impact that technological advancements will have on the world, it's a just time-management with a gimmicky name.
The two-pizza rule isn't the only example of Bezos' unique approach to running his company either, with the CEO also implementing an 'unusual' meeting technique to make sure every employee is pulling their weight.
He's also been known to fire off some pretty strange questions in interviews as well, with one employee recalling how she was hired after just two questions.