Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Leading beyond line of sight: Amazon’s two-pizza teams (INO204)

Summary

• Daniel Slater, a 17-year Amazon veteran, discusses Amazon's team structure and decision-making processes, focusing on the "two-pizza team" concept.
• The talk covers the cultural background of Amazon's team organization, the operation of different types of teams, and the governance that enables fast-paced innovation and high-quality decision-making.
• Slater emphasizes the importance of keeping the customer at the center of everything and empowering employees to innovate.
• He discusses the shift from a monolithic architecture to microservices at Amazon, which paralleled the restructuring of teams into smaller, more autonomous units.
• Amazon's leadership principles are highlighted as a common vernacular that aids in decision-making and innovation.
• The "two-pizza team" concept is explained as a means to foster ownership and autonomy, with teams being small enough to be fed with two pizzas.
• The drawbacks of the two-pizza team model are acknowledged, including minimized communication between teams, potential duplication of efforts, and the need for certain functions to be structured differently.
• Slater shares mechanisms used by teams to maintain autonomy and speed, such as strategic documents (PR/FAQ), operational narratives (Correction of Errors), and launch planning.
• The session concludes with an encouragement to apply these insights to attendees' own organizations and a reminder to fill out the event survey.

Insights

• Amazon's two-pizza team model is designed to reduce dependencies and increase focus on specific customer problems, which aligns with the microservices architecture that allows for faster innovation.
• Leadership principles at Amazon are not just guidelines but are actively used to shape team behavior and decision-making, fostering a culture of ownership and bias for action.
• The two-pizza team model intentionally limits communication between teams to maintain focus and speed, which is a significant departure from traditional organizational structures that emphasize inter-team communication.
• Amazon accepts the trade-off of potential duplication of efforts as a means to ensure that teams are not hindered by coordination delays, which can be critical in a fast-paced innovation environment.
• The narrative culture at Amazon, which favors written documents over presentations, is a key mechanism for ensuring clarity of thought and fostering inclusive discussion.
• The PR/FAQ document is a strategic tool used to democratize innovation, allowing any employee to propose new ideas while ensuring a rigorous examination of the customer impact and internal challenges.
• The Correction of Errors document serves as a learning tool for the organization, emphasizing the importance of understanding and sharing failures to prevent future issues and improve resilience.
• The detailed pre-launch planning process reflects Amazon's commitment to quality and preparedness, ensuring that teams have considered all aspects of architecture, release procedures, and incident management before going live with a new service or feature.