Company
Date Published
Author
Derek Ralston
Word count
860
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

In a blog post, PagerDuty shares insights from their experiment with team size, illustrating the challenges and lessons learned when deviating from Jeff Bezos' "two-pizza rule," which suggests keeping teams small enough to be fed by two pizzas to enhance efficiency. Initially, two separate Scrum teams were merged into a larger Kanban team to tackle a significant workload, but this resulted in communication difficulties, a lack of consensus, and reduced productivity, known as the Ringelmann Effect. The experiment underscored the importance of smaller teams for effective communication and process improvement, reaffirming the two-pizza rule's validity. Consequently, PagerDuty now forms delivery teams with clear charters, defined customers, ownership of their roadmaps, self-sufficiency, appropriate leadership, and sizes aligned with Scrum guidelines, ensuring teams are optimally structured for focus and consistent product delivery.