Bezos’ two-pizza rule needs an update

Jeff Bezos’ “two-pizza rule” is officially outdated, at least according to the field CTO of AI coding startup Cursor.

David Pan, who once managed engineering teams at Amazon, posted on X that the rule—keep any meeting or team small enough to feed with two large pizzas—was “an all-time great metaphor” that shaped software organizations for more than twenty years. “He was right about small teams,” Pan wrote. “Still is. But in the AI era, two pizzas is too much pizza.”

What the rule actually meant

Amazon’s internal guidance defines a two-pizza team as “ideally, less than 10 people.” The logic is straightforward: fewer people mean fewer lines of communication, less bureaucracy, and faster decisions. The company’s website still argues that these compact groups spend more time experimenting and serving customers.

Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Match Group, told an interviewer in March that he remains a fan.

Pan experienced the rule firsthand. His LinkedIn profile lists a three-year stint at Amazon as an engineering manager, from 2011 to 2014.

Why the metaphor no longer fits

Pan’s post sparked a flurry of replies proposing even smaller metaphors: the quarter-pizza team, the three-slice team. The common thread is that many workplace teams have gotten even smaller.

That compression isn’t universal. Some managers still push for larger, flatter teams to reduce layers of management. Those teams might need more than two pizzas. The tension between lean efficiency and broad collaboration hasn’t disappeared—it’s just shifted.

In practice, the rule was always more about communication overhead than actual pizza. Amazon writes that “ideally, this is a team of less than 10 people: smaller teams minimize lines of communication and decrease overhead of bureaucracy and decision-making.”

Pan later joked that his original point was undermined by the sheer volume of pizza his colleagues could consume. “I’ve learned that you all can eat a lot of pizza,” he wrote in a follow-up comment.

Amazon’s website still promotes the two-pizza rule, but the company itself has grown into an organization with thousands of teams, many of which would require a food truck rather than a couple of pies. The rule’s legacy endures less as a strict guideline and more as a reminder that small, focused groups often outperform larger, unwieldy ones.