Why Small Teams Win in the Age of AI 

Episode Transcript

Welcome to The Agile Marketing Edge, the first podcast dedicated to turning Agile theory into real world marketing breakthroughs.

I'm Andrea Fryrear, CEO of Agile Sherpas, and your guide on this climb to smarter, faster, outcome-driven marketing. Every week, we unpack the what, who, and how behind Agile marketing, from building high velocity workflows and slashing waste, to measuring what really matters, and scaling success across teams. You'll hear quick hit strategies you can deploy today, plus candid stories from marketers who've traded chaos for clarity and never looked back.

And because no Sherpa summits alone, I'll be joined by trailblazing guests, coaches, practitioners, CMOs, and other experts, sharing the sharp tactics and hard won lessons that keep them on the leading edge. So lace up those virtual hiking boots, limit your whip, and let's start ascending. This is your weekly shot of practical, no fluff,

Agile insight, so you can deliver more value with less busy work, and love your marketing again. Hit follow wherever you listen, and let's carve the next switchback together. Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of The Agile Marketing  Edge. This week, we're talking about the term two pizza team. It was originally coined by Jeff Bezos, and it talked about wanting teams to be small enough that they could be fed with two large pizzas.

And for Jeff, this encapsulated the power of simple, smaller teams to move fast and avoid getting bogged down with too much overhead. They needed to be able to release things, to work together quickly, and just get stuff done. In marketing, this kind of small team mentality is not the norm.

Especially as our profession has fragmented and become more siloed over the years. So now, we are in this world where content is a team, social is a team,

MarTech is a team, comms is a team. And they might not even think they're in marketing. And the list goes on, and on, and on. So the ability to bring together a small enough group of people so they can move really fast and not waste time on project management or communication overhead, and still have the right skills that they need to get real work done, has gotten to the point of being nearly impossible.

But now, we're being asked to do more with less, stretch the budget, just get AI to do it.

And if I'm being honest, like as a marketer, some of those phrases like make me throw up in my mouth a little bit. But, but, but, but, there are parts of this pared down, simplified approach to modern marketing that I can get behind.

There are pieces of this that are not all bad, and that's what we're gonna emphasize and fixate on today. So AI can augment and extend individual marketers' capabilities.

So, a two pizza team in 2025 can potentially do a hell of a lot more than the same sized group of marketers could have accomplished five years ago.

So this is a good thing. But today's episode is not about how to incorporate AI agents onto your team, or make sure they don't destroy your brand, or any of that stuff.

Today we're talking about why you should actually be excited about having a small team, and maybe, just, just maybe even looking for ways to get into smaller teams if you're not on one right now.

And so first, I want to introduce a phrase that I recently came across that I think just beautifully encapsulates the feeling of this problem, and that's collaboration drag.

Like drag is just such a good word. It's fun to say. It's evocative, right? The drag of collaboration. You can feel it. All these people like have ahold of you, and you have to collaborate, and they're just pulling you down, down.

It's a good word. It's a good phrase. I can't take credit for it. It comes from Gartner, and they report that organizations with high levels of collaboration drag are 37% less likely to exceed revenue and profitability goals.

So what's collaboration drag? It's that friction that slows down work, when too many people or meetings or approval steps get involved.

It's that wasted time and wasted energy that comes from unclear roles and endless review cycles, and having too many people who need to weigh in on everything before anything can move forward. Sadly, this is way too prevalent in marketing. Gartner reports again that 84% of marketers say they have high collaboration drag in their cross-functional work, and that it's driven by complex buying cycles and large stakeholder groups preach. And it's just gonna get worse for a second, so hang on. Team members with high collaboration drag are 15 times more likely to feel burned out and nine times more likely to consider leaving.

All right. So leaders, if you're listening and you've got people that you don't wanna lose, you gotta figure out this collaboration drag thing.

Marketers, if you hate collaboration drag, you too need to figure out this small teams thing. Uh, so we're gonna get into like how this works. But if we poke at this idea a little bit more, it starts to really make sense as to why collaboration drag is such a problem and why Jeff Bezos is so onto something with the two-pizza team. So let's imagine, just for a moment, a team of eight, reasonably sized team. If I'm on this team of eight people, I need to know the skills, and the commitments, and the working schedules, and the preferences of seven other complicated humans, and we all need to get together periodically to collaborate, either in small sub-groups or with all eight of us together. We gotta do that on some kind of semi-regular basis in order to get work done together. And as we're doing that, somebody always misses a meeting.

They get sick, or they have a doctor's appointment, or their kid gets sick, or they have PTO, or they have a family emergency, or they have an emergency project somewhere else in the organization, and they get pulled into that and a portion of their work just stops, and all of that's happening across eight humans, and this is a, just an eight-person team.

And yet, when this eight-person team originally formed and began talking about what our work would be like and how we would work together, we built a plan that pretended like none of that was going to happen. We have this plan that assumes perfect clarity and uninterrupted availability from all of these humans. And of course, the more humans there are, the more these things happen. And not only are there these inevitable unpredictable parts of life, there are more emails, more Slack and instant messages, more quick chats that you get pulled into, and just more updates that I, as one person on this team, have to manage.

That is what collaboration drag looks like and how it shows up and just consumes working time.

And when that's happening to every single person on a team, the available capacity to get anything done shrinks to this tiny little pinprick of time on your calendar when nobody's around.

And that is why small teams rule. That's why we need to embrace the two-pizza team and get collaboration drag behind us.

Because when we have a small team, even if, even if we have a really specialized resource who has a big life emergency, the team knows enough about what they do to pick things up because they work really closely together all the time. We have had this happen on numerous occasions at Agile Sherpas. We are a two-pizza team, less than two pizzas. If we're really hungry, maybe we need two pizzas.

But we have specialized skills and people have had death in the family, major illness, those things that just you can't log in and check. You, you're not logging in. You're not doing work.

But we knew enough about their work, and the work was visualized in a backlog and on a Kanban board, that the rest of the team could step in, maybe not as, as good of a job as that person would've done, but the work didn't utterly stall.

So the small team, the powerful and mighty team free of collaboration drag and able to be fed by a s- tiny number of pizzas, that's what we want. But we do need to do one more term definition here because when I say small team,

I probably mean a much smaller team than you think, because the data is very clear on what small means, and it is almost certainly way, way smaller than the team that you're on right now. So let's start with our friends at McKinsey.

So McKinsey reviewed more than 5,000 executive teams' notes, and what they found is that effectiveness starts to diminish if there are more than 10 people.... working together.

At that point, we have sub-teams that begin to form. People informally group themselves together into sub-teams, and they are doing stuff, right, sort of on the sly, on the side.

Decisions slow down and feelings of shared ownership drop.

Collaboration drag, bad. This is, really makes sense because other data shows us that collaboration overhead, right, that high level of activity that we have to do to just stay in touch with our team grows in a nonlinear fashion with team size.

I'm gonna put this equation in the show notes so that you can see it written out, but here's what it looks like.

The P-M-B-O-K, PMBOK, communication channels formula says N times N minus one divided by two, and it tells us why. A four-person team has only six possible one-to-one links.

If I am working with only three other people, there are only six possible direct one-to-one links between us. All four of those people. If we double the team size to eight, we do not double the number of one-to-one links to  12. They are not linearly connected. An eight-person team has 28 one-to-one links. That is 28 one-to-one relationships, communications, meetings that all have to be managed.

You ready for 12? 12-person team, 66. A 12-person team has 66 one-to-one links.

It is very clear why we need small teams if we want any hope of escaping collaboration drag and having time to actually power through the volume of work that we are expected to deliver as marketers in 2025.

One piece of non-marketing evidence for you. There was a task, an experiment run where people were asked to build LEGOs, do a LEGO project build.

A four-person team took 44% longer than a two-person team.

So four people took 52 minutes to build their LEGO project. A two-person team did the same activity, exact same thing, in only 36 minutes.

Pure collaboration drag. I mean, think about it, like I just think about when over the summer my husband and I took our kids camping. When my husband and I go and set up our campsite, man, we are a machine.

The tent and the picnic table cover, and we do the rain fly, and we got the tablecloth, and it just, we know, we know where things are, and we movin'.

But my kids are additional humans. We'll set aside for the moment that they are teen and tween, um, and so, you know, more collaboration drag with that age group maybe than with a grownup.

But just adding those additional people, right? They have questions. They don't know where things are. I get slowed way, way, way down by trying to help the new team members.

It's, in my opinion, a very good example of why just adding more bodies to an activity does not instantly make us faster or more effective.

So according to the research, the sweet spot for a team seems to be about five.

Beyond five, you get into that meeting sprawl where there's too many people that have to try to meet with one another in one-on-ones or big group meetings, and the calendars don't match, and it's like icky and gross and takes up too much time. So meeting sprawl and sub-teams.

Even at six or seven or eight people, you can get sub-teams forming, and then you lose collaboration, ownership, visibility when you have the sub-teams.

So around five, we get huge time savings, massive waste reduction, way less collaboration drag, and therefore we get the two things that every marketer wants, faster speed to market and happier teams doing it. Smaller teams equal faster speed to market and happier days in the office. So small teams alone, even if you just did the small team thing, that would be a huge advantage.But if you combine your two-pizza teams with Agile marketing, I mean, come on. You're gonna be so far ahead, it's not even fair. For example, let's just think about couple of small instances.

You would do sprint planning with your small team so you could create shared understanding across all of these people and eliminate 90% of the risk that comes with a small team. You would have visualized work in a backlog and on a kanban board so that you would have transparency and documentation so that if people are out, either planned or unplanned away-from-the-office time, other people on the team can pick things up and keep things moving forward.

Or when you're out, it's very easy for you to pick your work back up because it's all been documented and visualized.

No need to meet with everybody. It's all there in the board, and it just all gets better compounded improvement over time because you're gonna have retros, retrospectives on a regular basis.

So you talk about what's working, you fix what's not working, and everything just keeps getting better. So big of an unfair advantage.

So yeah, it can feel kinda crappy to have your team cut and to be stuck on a small team, but it can be powerful to be on this small and mighty and really unchained team.

So try to look on the bright side if you're on a small team. It kind of actually a superpower. And if you're on a giant team right now, one, now you understand, uh, why it's so hard to get things done, but don't despair.

You know, you can take an hour and map out all the steps, all the actions, the activities, the tools, and all the stuff that your team has to do to take s- to get something of value done. Pick something of a reasonable size. Maybe it's not a whole huge campaign, but something valuable and shippable that you could put out into the world. What's, what's a subset of the work that your big team does that you might be able to carve out a small team and get those people together to just do that piece?

And then, could another small group be simultaneously working on another valuable piece?

And so then maybe we can start to enjoy some of the benefits of the small two-pizza team without having to do the big reorg or any of the stuff that slows us down and makes us all really, really scared.

And to avoid those small teams just becoming silos, we can adopt a team of teams model where we send just a representative from those teams to talk to each other daily for their own standup meeting. That way, we can stay aligned, we can stay in sync, but we're not introducing all of the collaboration drag back in.

We can still tr- stay true to the two-pizza rule, but we're not just building new flavors of silos. So get a little creative here, right? Think progress over perfection. We don't have to go from a giant team of 50 to only teams of five overnight. Look for some clever ways to get smaller and smarter and, of course, more Agile.

Thank you so much for being here. And until next time, remember, the struggle is real, but so is Agile marketing.