An important goal of the 2 pizza rule is to prevent groupthink, a phenomenon that occurs when a large group’s need for consensus overrides the judgment of individual group members.

The rule also discourages HiPPO, an acronym that stands for the "highest paid person’s opinion" or the "highest paid person in the office." HiPPO describes the tendency for lower-paid employees to defer to higher-paid employees when a decision has to be made.

After devoting nearly 50 years to the study of team performance, the late Harvard researcher J. Richard Hackman concluded that four to six is the optimal number of members for a project team and no work team should have more than 10 members.