Most studies have consistently shown that the optimal size of a work team is around 5-7 people. Many of us Amazon.com alumni used to call this concept the “two-pizza teams“–if it takes more than two pizzas to feed your team, then the team is too large. “Two pizza teams” have been around for a while now, well before “Agile” and “Scrum” entered the Product Development vernacular.

At BigDoor, we’ve been growing so fast that it was taking about 5 pizzas to feed our growing dev team. Plans to split into smaller teams began to get more serious. Finally last week, with the addition of our new awesome Product Managers Fayez and Scott, we re-organized into three scrum teams. Each team now has 6-7 members and the results have been immediate.

Here are some things we saw in the new teams’ first week:
• Planning meetings took less than an hour
• Team members have been more vocal and participating more in meetings
• Team members are much more aware of the status of the sprint and if co-workers need help
• New teams had successful sprints
• Sprint stories fall much more within a theme and are less randomized, resulting in a more focused team

As we continue to grow our organization it’s really exciting to take knowledge that worked very well in the past and apply it to our team.  Now, what’s for lunch!?