The Two-Pizza rule for Slack and Zoom
By: Guerrilla Product
Tags: Slack, Zoom, Productivity, Internal Tooling, Product Management

Cap participants of slack channels and zoom meetings to improve the experience for all.

Most people have heard of the Two Pizza Rule. Attributed to Jeff Bezos the rule states that a team should be only so big, that 2 pizzas* would be sufficient to feed them. The logic is, that while with more heads you have more input, you also have more overhead when it comes to communication. A group of 2 has 1 connection, a group of 4 has 6 connections, and a group of 122 people (number of people in our #product slack group) has 7381 connections. So if your goal is engagement and participation of all members between members it becomes increasingly difficult with the size of the group.

Bezos and one of the two pizzas

If your goal is a means of mega-phoning information to the masses, this obviously doesn’t matter, state-of-the-union-ing it will be fine. But if you want to have an egalitarian team, where the conversation is encouraged and all participants free and welcome to contribute, you need to think about the size. This sweet spot can be conveniently described by how many people can be fed by 2 pizzas. Assuming everyone has a quarter, and you don't want to be too scant, that's 7–8 people per project team. Any more people and the efficiency of the team suffers from the addition of more people.

This rule has been very helpful for me, and even more acutely during the corona-times, in 2 places: Slack groups and Zoom meetings.

One tricky thing to balance with slack how much to use it, another is how to arrange groups. What to call them, who to include in each group, etc. Some people prefer a lesser amount of central channels with many topics, while others prefer one slack channel per topic. Whatever your opinion, I’ve found that any more than 8 in a Slack channel, then that channel becomes a dust bowl, used almost exclusively for announcements.

I’m a product manager for internal tools. I need to encourage feedback from the users in our company. Not just feedback in general, but feedback about what they find hard, what's difficult and what their problems are. Not very many people are confident enough to voice their problems in a 122 person #product channel. A few months ago, I started adding some new product-user channels, I essentially broke up the users into cohorts based on the job and geo. The result has been far more people bringing up things that they’re having problems with as well as healthy discussions.

I snapped this image up from https://wonderfulengineering.com/golden-two-pizza-rule/

We’re all working out how to use zoom more effectively in these challenging times. How to do product updates or new product rollouts to the internal teams is also tricky. Usually, a tool that we build is specific for one user group, but then there is that other user group that the tool might be relevant for and that other-other user group that fairly likes to be kept in the know about whats going on. The end result is that you end up with product workshops including not just the user group that it's designed for, but every other man, his dog, and the dog's grandma. Unfortunately, that has its ramifications.

Any more than 7–8 people in a zoom meeting and engagement drops off a cliff, No videos are turned on, so it's impossible to gauge if you’re being understood or not, and people are less confident enough to speak up if they don't understand (except that one colleague we all have, who doesn’t seem to be phased even by a 200-people zoom meeting). Additionally, it sucks for you! You feel like you’re talking to a wall. Effectively making a recording and sharing it, in real-time. While trying to be democratic, you end up with a lower experience for the users for whom the training was designed, with little reward.

I’ve been using the two-pizza rule to address this in a couple of ways. First is to limit the workshops to 8 people and thus do more workshops. Obviously you need to be careful here, it's not going to scale well. But on the other hand, if you have different user groups in your different workshops, each can be tailored to those present, increasing the experience for all.

The other way to get around cutting people out of workshops is to record them and share the recording. As I noted above, with large numbers its effectively a live recording and viewing, so little is lost if people watch the recording at a later time.