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What’s the perfect team size? Getting it right really does make a difference.

Whether you’re a big company looking to move fast or a small startup growing your team, size really does matter.

Mark Ridley
The Startup
9 min readJun 26, 2019

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Photo by Eva Blue on Unsplash

Jeff Bezos, of the Amazon, is famously (if unreliably) credited with coining the two-pizza rule. This rule states that any team should be well-fed with only two pizzas, and is intended to imply that small teams are more effective than larger ones.

As someone who is both a little obsessed with getting the facts straight and who at one gluttonous point in my life halved a Domino’s XXL pizza with a colleague in a single sitting, I needed to research how big a team Jeff was implying with his frustratingly unspecific pizza order.

Fortunately, using the power of Domino’s Group Ordering Tool, we can reliably establish that the maximum size of a Bezoan team is 8 people. That’s real data for you, people.

So, we have now incontrovertibly proved that Jeff’s rule for team size is ‘up to 8’. This rule of thumb jibes nicely with a significant body of research into team dynamics which stretches all the…

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The Startup
The Startup

Published in The Startup

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Mark Ridley
Mark Ridley

Written by Mark Ridley

Technologist, lean evangelist, chaos monkey and Chief Technology Prevention Officer. Loves good coffee, hanging around on ropes and driving about in cars

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