a month ago
- The 'two-pizza team' concept at Amazon emphasizes small teams to enhance communication, autonomy, and fast decision-making, reducing bureaucracy and allowing reversible decisions without permission.
- As Amazon grew, organizational complexity increased with more teams, dependencies, and approval cycles, threatening the speed and ownership culture that initially drove success.
- Amazon's 'Working Backwards' product definition process involves writing documents like press releases and FAQs to clarify customer problems, but writing alone may slow idea validation.
- The emergence of coding agents and rapid prototyping, exemplified by the Amazon Quick Desktop team, allows building functional prototypes quickly before extensive writing, compressing idea-to-evaluation time.
- Teams should start with prototyping when uncertain about solutions, use the prototype like customers, learn from gaps, and then write documents based on tangible experience, improving decision quality and ownership.
- Maintaining a 'two-pizza team' culture with clear ownership, autonomy for reversible decisions, short feedback loops, and hiring for end-to-end problem ownership helps combat organizational inertia as products scale.