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by
Colin Bryar
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January 23, 2022 - February 20, 2024
Be evaluated by a well-defined “fitness function.” This is the sum of a weighted series of metrics. Example: a team that is in charge of adding selection in a product category might be evaluated on: a) how many new
Be the business owner. The team will own and be responsible for all aspects of its area of focus, including design, technology, and business results.
Be led by a multidisciplined top-flight leader.
Be approved in advance by the S-Team.
Today the advantages of a microservices-based architecture are well understood, and the approach has been adopted by many tech companies.
with microservices, it becomes possible to establish small, autonomous teams that can assume a level of ownership of their code that isn’t possible with a monolithic approach.
they had to meet with Jeff and their S-Team manager—often more than once—to discuss the team’s composition, charter, and fitness function. For
The team had a well-defined purpose. For example, the team intends to answer the question, “How much inventory should Amazon buy of a given product and when should we buy it?”
The boundaries of ownership were well understood.
The metrics used to measure progress were agreed upon.
Importantly, the specifics of how the proposed team would go about achieving its goal were not discussed at the meeting. That was the team’s role to figure out for themselves.
started with a small number of two-pizza teams so that we could learn what worked and refine the model before widespread adoption.
Other teams, however, put off doing the unglamorous work of removing their dependencies and instrumenting their systems. Instead, they focused too soon on the flashier work of developing new features, which enabled them to make some satisfying early progress.
Their dependencies remained, however, and the continuing drag soon became apparent as the teams lost momentum.
“most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.
The OP1 process we described in chapter one still framed the autonomy of these teams by aligning them with company strategy, giving them their initial bearing toward upcoming yearly targets.
While each two-pizza team crafted its own product vision and development roadmap, unavoidable dependencies could arise in the form of cross-functional projects or top-down initiatives that spanned multiple teams.
Two-Pizza Teams Worked Best in Product Development
The answer turned out to be no, because those areas did not suffer from the tangled dependencies that had hampered Amazon product development.
fitness functions never really delivered on their promise for a couple of important reasons.
We found instead that two-pizza teams could also operate successfully in a matrix organization model, where each team member would have a solid-line reporting relationship to a functional manager who matched their job description—for example, director of software development or director of product management—and a dotted-line reporting relationship to their two-pizza manager.
we leaned into our geekdom and chose the computer science term “single-threaded,” meaning you only work on one thing at a time. Thus, “single-threaded leaders” and “separable, single-threaded teams” were born.
Amazon’s SVP of Devices, Dave Limp, summed up nicely what might happen next: “The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job.”
“Separable means almost as separable organizationally as APIs are for software.
Single-threaded means they don’t work on anything else.”
They clearly demarcate the boundaries of what they own and where the interests of other teams begin and end.
with Amazon Echo and Alexa, were it not for the fact that Amazon VP Greg Hart was assigned to be the single-threaded leader, there might have been one person in charge of hardware and another in charge of software for all of Amazon’s devices—but no one whose job it was to create and launch Amazon Echo and Alexa as a whole.
be stubborn on the vision but flexible on the details.
The second narrative form is the PR/FAQ.
The format often made it difficult to evaluate the actual progress and prevented the presentations from proceeding as planned.
“For serious presentations,” he wrote, “it will be useful to replace PowerPoint slides with paper handouts showing words, numbers, data graphics, images together.
Tufte offered wise advice on how to get started. “Making this transition in large organizations requires a straightforward executive order: From now on your presentation software is Microsoft Word, not PowerPoint. Get used to it.”
pager. (Note: this example would fit easily onto six pages of 8.5 x 11–inch paper, single-spaced in 11-point type, but reproduction in this book may run longer due to formatting differences.) Dear PowerPoint: It’s Not You, It’s Us Our decision-making process simply has not kept up with the rapid growth in the size and complexity of our business. We therefore advocate that, effective immediately, we stop using PowerPoint at S-Team meetings and start using six-page narratives instead. What’s Wrong with Using PowerPoint? S-Team meetings typically begin with a PowerPoint (PP) presentation that
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the product vision narrative. Do we do this? Hoew can I include these elements in our product brief.
An Amazon quarterly business review, for instance, might be broken down like this instead: Introduction Tenets Accomplishments Misses Proposals for Next Period Headcount P&L FAQ Appendices (includes things like supporting data in the form of spreadsheets, tables and charts, mock-ups)
We mentioned earlier the estimated reading speed of three minutes per page, which led to the six-page limit. If yours is a 30-minute meeting, a three-page narrative would therefore be more appropriate.
First-time presenters often start by saying, “Let me orally walk you through the document.” Resist that temptation; it will likely be a waste of time.
Some groups at Amazon go around the room, ask for high-level feedback, then pore over the document line by line. Other groups ask a single individual to give all their feedback on the entire document, then ask the next person in the audience to do the same. Just pick a method that works for you—there’s no single correct approach.
They seek clarification, probe intentions, offer insights, and suggest refinements or alternatives.
The key goal of the meeting, after all, is to seek the truth about the proposed idea or topic.
During the discussion stage, it’s also important that notes be taken on behalf of the entire audience, preferably by someone knowledgeable
If I don’t see anyone taking notes at the discussion stage, I will politely pause the meeting and ask who is going to do so.
(I would typically give a printout of the narrative with my handwritten notes on it to the presenters after the meeting.) Both people told me that my comments had played a key role in making their businesses successful.
You are not just commenting on a document, you’re helping to shape an idea,
Mostly it’s about supporting the team by giving robust feedback.
Final Thoughts About Narratives Narratives are designed to increase the quantity and quality of effective communication in your organization—by an order of magnitude over traditional methods.
But as we’ve seen, this model imposes duties and expectations upon the audience as well. They must objectively and thoroughly evaluate the idea, not the team or the pitch, and suggest ways to improve it.
In this way, the presenter and audience become integrally linked to the subsequent success or failure of the initiative, or the correctness or incorrectness of a team’s business analysis.
Either way, if the narrative process works to its fullest potential, you’re all in it together.
Start with the Desired Customer Experience Start with the customer and work backwards—harder than it sounds, but a clear path to innovating and delighting customers. A useful Working Backwards tool: writing the press release and FAQ before you build the product.
Its principal tool is a second form of written narrative called the PR/FAQ, short for press release/frequently asked questions.
