Chapter 3. What Are We Building Here?

Defining What to Build

Design is a process of making dreams come true.

—THE UNIVERSAL TRAVELER

LET’S PLAY A GAME. (I’m imagining the computer voice from the movie WarGames. GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN...SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? Alas, I digress.)[53]

How many people do you think are on the following product or feature teams?

  • Apple’s iMovie and iPhoto

  • Twitter

  • Instagram

  • Spotify

Hint: the number is definitely smaller than you think.

  • Apple’s iMovie and iPhoto: 3 and 5, respectively[54]

  • Twitter: 5–7[55]

  • Instagram: 13 when acquired for $1 billion by Facebook[56]

  • Spotify: 8[57]

We also know that the team that created the first iPhone prototypes was “shockingly small.”[58] Even Jony Ive’s design studio at Apple—the group responsible for the industrial design of every product, as well as projects like iOS 7—is only 19 people.[59] And we can surmise that this group is broken up into smaller teams to work on their own individual projects.

Figuring out what product you’re going to build is an exercise in working through the research you’ve gathered, empathizing with your audience, and deciding on what you can uniquely create that’ll solve the problems you’ve found. But it’s also an exercise in deciding how big the team is and who’s on it.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon famously coined a term for teams of this size: the “two-pizza team.”[60] In other words, if the number of people on a team can’t be fed by two pizzas, then it’s too big. Initially conceived to create “a decentralized, ...

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