Price’s Law, the 2 Pizza Rule and Scrum teams or Why 9 should be your max team size

I’ve been thinking a lot about Price’s Law lately. It says that half the work of any team is done by the square root of the total number of people. In other words, in a team of nine, maybe three people are doing half the heavy lifting. Based on my experience this is pretty accurate. 

Now, why does this matter? For starters, Scrum suggests teams of 5–9 members. Apply Price’s Law to the upper limit of nine, and the math says about three folks tackle half the tasks. It’s not a criticism of anyone else’s work—it’s just a reminder that a few core contributors usually carry a lot of the load. Similarly, Jeff Bezos’s famous “Two Pizza Rule” says if two pizzas can’t feed your team, you’re dealing with too many people. This is typically understood to mean 5-7 people.

In my experience, smaller teams tend to stay tighter, collaborate better, and keep accountability crystal clear. Price’s Law reveals that simply adding more people doesn’t guarantee more output. In fact, it can mask who’s really carrying the load. And Brooks’s Law tells us that adding people to a late project makes the project later. Instead of adding more bodies to fix a bottleneck, sometimes it’s smarter to empower your best people and remove any blockers holding them back. A big part of being a good leader is knowing how to set your team up for success.

My only caveat to this is the need for a team to be cross functional. In other words, the team should have everyone on it that is needed to take an idea from commitment to production. So if you need a front end developer, back end developer, QA engineer, Designer and a Product Owner, you’re already at 5. That doesn’t even include a scrum master. Keep your teams small, but make sure they have all the resources they need to do the job they’ve been asked to do.

TLDR: Smaller, cross-functional teams can outshine larger ones, thanks to clearer accountability and more focused collaboration.