Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on how the company transitioned from a monolithic application architecture to a distributed one:
We created a blueprint for change with our “Distributed Computing Manifesto.” This was an internal document describing a new architecture. With this manifesto, we began restructuring our application into smaller pieces called “services” that enabled us to scale Amazon dramatically.
But changing our application architecture was only half the story. Back in 1998, every Amazon development team worked on the same application, and every release of that application had to be coordinated across every team.
To support this new approach to architecture, we broke down our functional hierarchies and restructured our organization into small, autonomous teams, small enough that we could feed each team with only two pizzas. We focused each of these “two-pizza teams” on a specific product, service, or feature set, giving them more authority over a specific portion of the app. This turned our developers into product owners who could quickly make decisions that affected their individual products.
Breaking down our organization and application structures was a bold idea, but it worked. We were able to innovate for our customers at a much faster rate, and we’ve gone from deploying dozens of feature deployments each year to millions, as Amazon has grown. Perhaps more dramatically, our success in building highly scalable infrastructure ultimately led to the development of new core competencies and resulted in the founding of AWS in 2006.
Technological change requires new ways of working — especially when the change is happening at the structural level. Decentralizing the implementation at the technical level isn’t enough; decision-making must be decentralized as well. I read Amazon’s transition to two-pizza teams as a push towards bottom-up systemic interventions.
This strikes me as a more appropriate response to today’s complex challenges than the top-down hierarchies of the past. Alas, many designers and product managers are still operating within organizational structures that emerged during the industrial revolution, and which don’t easily accommodate bottom-up decision-making.