Independence,autonomy,too many small teams

Two-pizza teams were meant to give a small, self-contained group full ownership of a customer problem, removing the need for constant cross-team coordination. In practice many organizations have turned that principle into a race to create ever smaller slices of work, assigning each slice to its own "autonomous" team without preserving the original end-to-end mission.

The original model pairs two core ideas: a clear mission that delivers direct business value and the independence to achieve it without relying on other groups. When a team can own the entire value chain, communication overhead drops dramatically and velocity rises.

What breaks is the over-splitting of problems. A single data-delivery function becomes three separate teams-ingestion, processing, and release-each with a narrow scope that no longer ties to a customer outcome. The mission is diluted, autonomy evaporates, and managers re-introduce coordination layers to stitch the pieces together. The result is the very coordination overhead the two-pizza concept sought to eliminate, plus the hidden cost of collaboration during execution.

True autonomy means a team can deliver customer value on its own, not just execute an isolated task. Scaling such teams requires preserving end-to-end ownership, keeping missions meaningful, and resisting the temptation to multiply tiny, inter-dependent squads. Otherwise, organizations end up with many small teams that communicate more, not less, and see productivity stall.