Laughed when I read ”We where 11 engineers that could be fed with 2 pizzas”. But you are in Sweden? You can feed maybe 3-4 engineers with 2 Swedish pizzas. Which is also coincidentally a very decent team size ime!
maybe only serve milk or protein-shakes to further increase this effect.
I agree about team size, 3-5 is good, any larger and people will start wandering off on their own or create cliques.
I'm also not a fan of "sync standups", that's micro management garbage. A three minute 'i'm blocked, who can help?' or 'no blockers today' session, that's the sweet spot. If someone wants a report on progression and so on they can book a meeting with a clear agenda in advance and the relevant people can prepare and do a succinct description of where they're at. No meeting that takes more than five minutes and doesn't have a set agenda should ever be held.
Takes only a few seconds more. Of course, the Dev should know beforehand what he is going to say ;)
Things like planning, ETA:s and the like that management roles are nervous about should be handled in another setting, because these are open-ended activities that might take one minute or thirty and making those decisions requires preparation that should absolutely not, ever, be done during the meeting. This takes discipline on the part of the manager, who has to figure out a clear purpose, who is a relevant participant, ask them individually when they have time, reserve the room or equivalent, write the invitation with agenda, send it out.
Commonly it's more done like 'we have a problem', 'ok, we'll meet after this', and then people waste half an hour doing a defective version of that process as an unnecessary group exercise.
The 2-pizza thing coined by Bezos means 6-8 people.
I'm guessing most of those fifteen minute meetings had a set topic, or agenda as I called it previously, and ended as soon as it became clear that it wouldn't be immediately productive or the relevant decisions were made. I've been in many, many fifteen minute meetings where someone spent the entire time in palpation for something that could drag it out for even longer.
It's not uncommon that people are brought into meetings to basically engage in parasocial comforting of someone in a position of leadership they don't have the maturity or competence to perform in, in organisations that did very little to support their assigned leaders. I find this practice quite offensive and that moving away from such ceremonies to people calling a meeting making clear in advance what they want answers to and giving the participants time to prepare paves the way for trust, accountability and flexibility in the work that allows the team to respond better to challenges.
I dunno, we (Swedes) tend to do personal pizzas (1 per person), at least where I grew up. They're most likely talking about family size pizzas or something, but even then it sounds like too little, you'd feed maybe 3 people tops per family size pizza.
Or maybe me and my friends were just overly excited about our pizzas.