Electronic product development and two pizza teams

I recently attended the NFAIS conference in Philadelphia where Neil Roseman, Vice President, Digital Technology from Amazon.com spoke about their internal electronic product development methodology.  Apparently Jeff Bezos coined the name “two pizza teams” to capture their philosophy regarding the size of a team.  Bezos believes that a development team should be no larger than what two pizzas can feed for dinner.  According to Roseman, any pizza team cannot be larger than 10 people (I guess that means each would have 1.6 slices of pizza for dinner using a normal 8 slice pizza).  The main goal of this approach is to lower the hierarchical communication overhead. 

The first step in the two pizza team methodology is to write a press release.  Yes, that’s correct, write a press release. This step forces the IT team to articulate what the definition of success looks like for the project.  This is no small feat in many IT environments.  Personally, I find this step very interesting and one that is lacking on many project teams that I have encountered where they are either behind schedule or struggling to actually complete a project.  Defining what success looks like is critical to any project regardless of the final form.  A press release is a great way to focus on this step.

The second step is to develop all of the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s) and answer them.  This is an interesting step, but it should not be replaced by actually writing requirements.

The third step is to write a user manual.  Again, the written communication helps articulate the requirements in a non-techie way which ultimately helps both business and technical team members.

And finally, the team actually gets to complete mockups or prototypes of the new product.

The overall takeaway that I gained from Roseman’s presentation was that rapid electronic product development needs to adhere to a loose set of processes while clearly articulating requirements and success.  I believe this approach is something that many publishers who are developing electronic products could latch onto and be successful.

One final note:  I was disappointed that Roseman never addressed the challenge of selecting toppings on a pizza by a group.  I could see the decision making process around selecting a topping being a critical barrier to the ordering process and may actually be detrimental to the overall progress of the project.

Comments

[salas]

Sometimes it might be better to go with 3 mediums than 2 larges. I like how they didn't limit the soda consumption. For a software development group, that's very important.