Akademik

n.

In a business environment, a team of employees that is not too large (and so can be fed with at most two pizzas).

Over time, Mr. Bezos's unusual management style began to develop....

He wanted a decentralized, even disorganized company where independent ideas would prevail over groupthink. He instituted, as a company-wide rule, the concept of the "two-pizza team"—that is, any team should be small enough that it could be fed with two pizzas.

—Richard L. Brandt, " Birth of a Salesman: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203914304576627102996831200.html," The Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2011

There were a couple of keys to keeping the projects on track, Carter says. The teams used an agile development approach to get frequent feedback from people outside the teams. Also, Carter kept teams small. "We try to keep some of these innovative teams in IT down to what we call 'two-pizza teams.' If you can't feed them with two pizzas, they're probably getting too big," he says.

—Paul McDougall, " How FedEx Has Adapted From Overnight To Over Net: http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/231600966," InformationWeek, September 14, 2011

He also described the developer culture within Amazon, where the ideal size for development is a "two-pizza" team—one that can feed all its members with two pizzas. "Amazon is a tech company, dominated by software engineers and run by a computer-science grad," he said.

—Sean Gallagher, " Amazon.com at LinuxWorld: All Linux, All the Time: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Amazoncom-at-LinuxWorld-All-Linux-All-the-Time/," eWeek, January 21, 2004