Why Are Amazon Interfaces & Reports So Inconsistent? Amazon's Jeff Bezos Pizza Rule

Name: Why Are Amazon Interfaces & Reports So Inconsistent? Amazon's Jeff Bezos Pizza Rule
Uploaded: 2023-04-06T20:47:00+00:00
Duration: 56 s
Channel: Andrew Hamada
Description: A short video by Andrew Hamada arguing that Amazon's inconsistent interfaces and reports stem from its organizational structure—specifically the…

6 Apr 2023 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:56

A short video by Andrew Hamada arguing that Amazon's inconsistent interfaces and reports stem from its organizational structure—specifically the ‘two-pizza team’ model Jeff Bezos promoted—leading to many small, independently-managed engineering teams that produce divergent UIs and reports. The speaker links this historical founding principle to present-day discrepancies across Amazon products and reporting tools.

Chapters

Amazon's interfaces and reports are extremely inconsistent, almost like they're built by different teams and managed by different people. While nobody can give you an answer to this except Amazon, I think the reason why this happens is the way that Amazon was founded and structures engineering. Most folks have heard of Jeff Bezos's two pizza team concept. It's the idea that an engineering team should never be so big that you can't feed it with two pizzas. The goal was to allow people to act agilely and enable collaboration really quickly and tightly and then to le a collaboration between teams as a second order consideration later on. That worked great in the early days. Fast forward 20 plus years and you have the modern situation where Amazon is still to a degree trying to resource this way. The reason why you see this incredible discrepancy between different report types and interfaces is because different people are building them and those people don't roll up to the same managers, directors or vice presidents.