Working Backwards

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2006 NFAIS Annual Conference Working Backwards
2-Pizza Teams Neil Roseman, Amazon.com February
27th, 2006
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Working Backwards

• We want to start with the customer and work
  backwards
• Most new Products first create a
• Press Release
• FAQ
• User Manual
• Mockups/Simple Prototype

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AMAZON.COM UNVEILS MECHANICAL TURK MARKETPLACE
FOR HUMAN INTELLIGENCE SEATTLE Sometime, 2005
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ AMZN) today unveiled
Mechanical Turk, (www. turk.com) which uses
the Internet to connect people who want tasks
completed with people willing to complete them
for a fee. Mechanical Turk exposes a set of
APIs that enable computer programs to deploy a
network of humans to complete tasks. With most
problems humans can out-compute machines, like
finding specific objects in pictures, evaluating
beauty, or translating text, said Jeff Bezos,
Amazon.com Founder and Chief Executive Officer.
The idea of Mechanical Turk is to give computers
access to a network of humans to solve these
kinds of problems-- and to pay these humans for
the intelligence they provide." Thousands of
tasks have already been submitted. A few
examples include ? Which of these five
photographs are clearest? (Requester A9.com
fee 0.25/each) A9.com is augmenting its search
results with photos of locations. It has taken
multiple photos of each location and is using the
Mechanical Turk network to determine the optimal
photo. There are tens of thousands of these
requests waiting for completion. ? Translate
this paragraph of text from Czech to English
(Requester Microsoft fee 10.00) Microsoft
has incorporated Mechanical Turk into Microsoft
Word so that any user can highlight a paragraph
of text, right click, and request any text to be
translated from one language to another.
? Return the lyrics to the song Piano Man by
Billy Joel (Requester RealNetworks fee 1.00)
In order to drive more traffic to its music
download pages, RealNetworks is enlisting Turks
to submit the lyrics to this song. Theyre
requesting this same service for hundreds of
other songs.
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2 Pizza Teams

• Team can feed itself dinner with 2 Pizzas (no
  anchovies, please)
• Lowering (hierarchical) communication overhead
  primary goal
• Force processes to be loosely coupled
• Focus on the inputs through Fitness Functions

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2PT Ground Rules

• 2 pizza team ground rules In order for a team
  to be approved as a 2 pizza team it must meet the
  following criteria
• 1) the business owner is the leader of the 2
  pizza team. What this means to a technology
  pizza team is that the programmers are the
  customer and the implementer they are both
  writing the spec and implementing it
• 2) The quality and effectiveness of the work can
  be improved through iteration and is expected to
  continue for multiple years, and never less than
  2 years. At Amazon.com we would call this
  programmatic work as opposed to project work.
• 3) The team is autonomous and interaction with
  other teams inside the company is extremely
  limited, and where it does occur, it is extremely
  well documented. In other words, the team is
  composed of nearly all the pieces it needs and
  can make changes without regard or impact to
  other teams work or schedules. The team owns
  every aspect of its systems.
• 4) The work can be accomplished by a team no
  larger than 10 people. In fact, the optimal team
  is composed of 1 person that operates
  independently.
• 5) Team effectiveness can be measured by a
  fitness function which directly measures the
  impact of the teams work, or input.
• 6) The team is composed only of A people.

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Iteration Empiricism
A wise man proportions his belief to the
evidence

• Software is not a building
• Small bites are good
• Scrum works
• Trust your developers
• One month of development is worth months of
  analysis

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2006 NFAIS Annual Conference Working Backwards
2-Pizza Teams Neil Roseman, Amazon.com February
27th, 2006