Jeff Bezos apparently had a rule for meetings: if you couldn’t feed everyone in the room with two pizzas, the room was too big. Roughly six to eight people, depending on how hungry they are. The rule was designed to keep teams small, decisions fast, and accountability clear. It has been an idea that gets brought up in business culture ever since and it is, in my opinion, actually a pretty good rule, sort of.
If you disagree with it, one of two things is probably true. Either you don’t want to do the work that keeping meetings small actually requires — which is the work of leadership. Or you are someone who needs a good lead to do that work for you. Neither is a criticism. Both are worth knowing about yourself.
Not All Gatherings Are Meetings
Before getting into what the two pizza rule is actually about, it’s worth making a distinction that most meeting culture doesn’t usually dive into.
In my opinion, not every gathering is a meeting. There are three kinds of gatherings that regularly get called meetings, treated as meetings, and scheduled with meeting-length blocks on the calendar — and only one of them is actually a meeting. Conflating them is where most meeting culture goes wrong, and it’s why so many people spend so much of their working lives in rooms or Zoom calls they have no need to be in.
The three kinds of gatherings are: announcements, stand-ups, and meetings. They are different things. They serve different purposes. They have different appropriate sizes. And knowing which one you’re in — and acting accordingly — is one of the more underrated skills in any collaborative environment.
The Announcement
An announcement is a gathering where information flows in one direction. Someone has something to tell a group of people. The group receives it, asks any small clarifying question or two, and goes back to work. The size of the room is largely irrelevant — twenty people can receive an announcement as efficiently as five, assuming the person delivering it is prepared and the room doesn’t turn it into something else.
Your job as an attendee of an announcement is simple: receive the information, ask one clarifying question if you have one, and leave with a clear understanding of what was communicated. That’s it.
Your job as a lead whose team was not in the room is equally simple and significantly more important: take what was communicated and relay it to the people who need to know, filtered and contextualized for what they actually need to do with it. Not a transcript. Not a forwarded email. A translation — here’s what this means for us, here’s what it changes, here’s what you need to know to keep working.
The biggest danger of an announcement is it becoming a meeting — in that it devolves into a conversation that will inevitably waste most people’s time that are also in the room. If you are leading the announcement it’s your job to keep answers to Q&A brief, or guide them to another forum — like an actual meeting. And if you don’t know the answer — say so. It will signal the need for a meeting — perhaps one after the announcement.
The Stand-Up
A stand-up is a specific kind of gathering with a specific structure. You say what you’re working on. You flag anything that’s blocking you. You move on. The next person does the same. The whole thing should take minutes, not hours, and the format is the point — the brevity is not a side effect, it’s the mechanism.
A stand-up is not a forum for debate. It is not a problem-solving session. It is not an opportunity to get into the weeds on a technical decision or relitigate something that was agreed upon last week. When it becomes any of those things, it stops being a stand-up and becomes a meeting that nobody scheduled properly, which is one of the more efficient ways to make everyone in the room feel like their time is being wasted.
If your stand-up regularly runs long, the problem is almost never the format. It’s that someone is using the stand-up to have a meeting.
It’s also worth asking whether a stand-up is even necessary for your team. Not every discipline or feature team needs one daily. That said, there is genuine value in having everyone in a team hear from each other regularly — even briefly. It builds awareness, maintains connection, and surfaces things that might otherwise stay siloed.
But here’s the thing that often gets lost: the stand-up is primarily a tool for the lead. The lead needs to know what the people they’re leading are working on, whether it’s serving the most immediate needs of the project, and what they need to do to unblock someone. Hearing it directly — out loud, in sequence — is categorically different from an optional message in a channel that may or may not get read. The stand-up exists so the lead can do their job. It is not a performance the team puts on for each other. It’s information the lead needs to serve the people giving it.
The Meeting
A meeting is a gathering where information flows in multiple directions, problems get worked through, and decisions get made. It requires participation from everyone in the room — not attendance, participation. If you’re sitting in a meeting as an audience member, something has gone wrong. Either you shouldn’t be there, or the meeting has turned into an announcement and nobody noticed.
This is where the two pizza rule lives. Eight people or fewer. Everyone there because their presence changes what gets decided. Come prepared. Take notes — because you may need to carry the results back to people who weren’t in the room. The meeting is where the lead’s job is most visible and most demanding: you’re not just a participant, you’re a filter. What comes out of that room needs to make it back to your team in a form they can use.
The Discipline Problem
Here’s a game development specific version of the two pizza rule that I think is worth adding to the conversation.
If you cannot get every relevant discipline meaningfully represented in a meeting of eight people or fewer, that is worth examining. Not as a headcount problem — the answer is not to cram more people into the room. As a structure problem. Are the right people in the right roles? Are your leads actually leading, or are they attending meetings as proxies for their entire discipline without the authority or context to represent it properly? Is your meeting trying to do something a meeting can’t do?
There’s a conversation happening right now in software development about whether the two pizza rule needs revising in the age of AI — the argument being that when AI handles most of the implementation, teams can shrink even further. That conversation is interesting but it doesn’t map cleanly onto game development. You can’t replace an animator or a sound designer or a narrative designer with a code-generating tool and call the discipline represented. The disciplines still need humans. Which means the question in game development isn’t about shrinking teams — it’s about whether your meeting structure actually serves the people making the game. Eight people can represent a lot of disciplines if the right eight people are in the room and they’re actually doing the work of leading.
You Signed Up For This
One last bit before I step down from the soap box. If you accepted a role as a lead — congratulations. You signed up for meetings. That is part of the job. Not a side effect of the job, not an unfortunate tax on your time, not something to be minimized or avoided. The meeting is where the lead earns part of their keep, by being in the room so the people they lead don’t have to be.
The lead’s job in a meeting is not to attend. It is to participate, filter, synthesize, and carry. To show up prepared, to contribute something that changes what gets decided, and to leave with a clear understanding of what needs to make it back to the team and how. That’s the work. It is not glamorous. It is also not optional.
When leads don’t do that work — when they attend meetings passively, relay nothing, or resist the meeting structure entirely — the meeting culture around them expands to compensate. More people in the room because the information isn’t making it back. Longer meetings because nobody is filtering what needs to be decided. Announcements that turn into meetings because nobody is doing the work of translating them afterward.
The size of your meetings is a diagnostic. A meeting culture full of large rooms and passive attendees is not a scheduling problem. It’s a leadership problem. And the fix is not a better calendar tool.