The Two-slice Team

📝 The Two-slice Team

For the past two decades, Amazon’s “two-pizza rule” has been the gold standard for team size.

The story goes like this: At a company retreat in 2002, when Amazon managers wanted more communication, Jeff Bezos fired back that “communication is terrible!” A few weeks later, he restructured the company around small autonomous teams. If a team had more than 10 people—more than could be fed by two pizzas—it was too big.

Twenty-four years later, two-pizza teams are now themselves too big for building software products. When each employee is armed with Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3, the ideal team size shrinks even further.

I call it the two-slice team. Two slices, to feed one person. (These are New York slices that you fold in half and eat standing at a counter.)

This is how we structure our product teams at Every. We have four software products, each run by a single person. Ninety-nine percent of our code is written by AI agents. Overall, we have six business units with just 20 full-time employees.

The two-slice team structure lets us ship faster, pivot more quickly, and maintain the entrepreneurial spirit that larger teams lose.

And these are real products, not just weekend vibe coding demos. For example, Monologue, our smart dictation app run by Naveen Naidu, is used about 30,000 times a day to transcribe 1.5 million words. The codebase totals 143,000 lines of code and Naveen’s written almost every single line of it himself with the help of Codex and Opus.

AI also helps Naveen do customer service and market research, and think through business and product strategy. It allows him to do by himself what would normally take 3–4 people before AI.

A two-slice team works well as a starting point for software products. But as these products have grown and as we’ve introduced new products we’ve also had to re-invent how the rest of the organization supports these teams.

How organizations support two-slice teams

Rather than putting more full-time employees on existing products, two-slice teams pull in help as needed from both inside and outside of Every.

To enable this, our design, growth, and marketing teams act as internal agencies that move team members in and out of projects as needed.