My thoughts on Amazon

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I spent 4 years working at Amazon, some things I loved, some not so much. Amazon is a huge company and the variation of behavior within a company exceeds the variation between the “median” behavior between companies. Even within the two teams I was on at Amazon I saw the exact opposite behaviors. When I talk about the good, I’ll talk about the ideal good, and when I talk about the bad, I’ll talk to some issues I saw that were systemically bad. As a result you’ll often see me describing something as both good and bad, as it’s done differently in different parts of the company.

The Good

Willingness to change

Federation of startups

The value placed on continuous improvement

The comfort with failure

Day 1 culture

Embracing change

Frugality and Resourcefulness

Frugality, done correctly is resourcefulness. It says, if you need 10 people, have 8, and you’ll do better work. If you have 12 people, you’ll start making up work, and bad stuff happens.

Begin with the end in mind - Working Backwards

Critical Thinking - Writing (and reading) Culture

Writing is thinking

Business Metrics focus - QBR/MBR/WBR

PR/FAQs

Fulfillment and Customer Days

Mandatory for e7+, and encouraged for lower. You take a day to work in a fulfillment center or be a customer service rep. You build empathy and be amazed at the work Amazon does

Here was me during my tour, loading a truck

Tenets

Hiring Process

Bar Raisers

The Mechanism Fly Wheel

Forte

Connections

Operational Excellence

OE Meetings

Dev Ops 101

Severity handling

COEs

Operational Excellence vs Engineering Excellence

Principal Engineers

Run books

These guys did

The rope to hang yourself

The two pizza team

The promo process

The Bad

The challenges with hyper growth - scaling people and culture

Day 2 Culture

A thing I saw at Amazon that made me really sad, was signs on the wall describing Day 1 vs Day 2 behavior. Such signs only exist when you have a Day 2 culture :(

A blend too junior

The decline of the hiring bar raiser

Pretending the subjective is objective

The 30 page promo document

The “style” and not “content” feedback on documents

The ambiguity of earns trust

The lost essence of “right a lot”

Not enough slack

Too much intensity

No one knows how to use Word

Frupidity

Frugality, done correctly is resourcefulness. It says, if you need 10 people, have 8, and you’ll do better work.

Some people used frugality to focus on not the high order bit. For example, I had a frequent battle over hardware which cost less than 15$/month.

Not rescuing a team

So hard to hire

Leadership Principles (LPs): The beating heart of Amazon

At Amazon training the first thing they tell you is “Everywhere else, you see the leadership principles on the wall, and no one knows what they are”, at Amazon, they are not on the walls, but instead we speak to them every day.

You don’t just speak to them daily, you speak to the leadership principles multiple times a day.

Design principles for Leadership

The dirty secret of LPs - You can justify anything

If you think of LPs as a “vector space”, you can use them to justify any behavior or action as a leadership principle.

Humorously, each LP has an opposite cancelling force.

LP How to refute with an LP
Bias for action You are not thinking big enough. You are not customer obsessed, you need to insist on high standards
   

LP Set: Ownership

Ownership

Customer Obsession

Right a lot

Think big

LP Set: Growth

Dive Deep

Insist on High Standards

Hire and Develop the best

Learn and be curious

LP Set: Do it

Bias for action

Deliver Results

Invent and Simplify

Frugality

LP Set: Good partners

Earn Trust

Have backbone, disagree and commit

Vocally self-critical

The curious

Building twice is faster than building once

Discourage interdependence between teams

Amazon as natural selection

Letting teams implode

Social Cohesion is bad

Sounds like good intentions

Work hard have fun change the world

My Experience at Amazon

My time at Amazon

I care deeply about the teams I work with, and my goodbye mail says it well.

What I wanted to learn at Amazon

Manager Skills:

Managing is hard. Lessons are hard-earned and should be cherished. This post is designed to make explicit, and improve behaviors and practices. It reminds us how to behave, and encourages continuous improvement.

As a new manager at Amazon, my top priorities:

  • Hiring
  • Growing my people
  • Defining Success Qualitatively and Quantitatively.
  • Setting the vision for the team

Bonus learnings at Amazon

  • Hiring!!
  • How much ownership a college hire can take
  • How much autonomy I can have
  • How quickly you can build the impossible.
  • Better ways for hiring, firing (Pivot), surveys (Connections), and feedback (Forte)

Live Video

Funny stories:

  • Deadline for first live stream, based on pregnant woman
  • Red carpet event couldn’t get cameras working - 3 tries to get our first stream out, got it right on take 3.

Video Shopping

  • The video that made me realize we need moderation
  • Launching and manual moderation watching all the videos ourselves

Charity Giving: Toys for Tots

Toys for tots