My product learnings from Amazon
“Nothing gives us more pleasure at Amazon than “reinventing normal”– creating inventions that customers love and resetting their expectations for what normal should be.”
The above quote is what I consider Jeff Bezos in a nutshell: an astonishing product leader who has a clear vision is mind and actively works to raise the standards for his customers. He is to me the personification of how you do good product development by never compromising on the vision but always being flexible on the details of how to get there. Someone who could see trends before they happened and created a fail-fast culture that is, in my opinion, the real competitive advantage of Amazon.
I have been recently taken some time to read all the letter to shareholders that he has been writing since 1997. It was an incredibly fascinating exercise to see how the first seed of extraordinary successful products like Alexa and AWS was planted. And a real eye-opener to recognize a clear pattern in all the letters.
Customer-centricity, mindset and long-term vision is what to me is the real fil-rouge of all his letters. The receipt of Amazon mind-blowing achievements. The idea that to reach success you have to create a culture of curiosity, where every employee approach a problem with beginner eyes. Thinking fresh and always balancing the long-term vision with its daily decisions, knowing that every single decision influence the path towards the big goal. Knowing that the road to success is anything but straight. It requires to constantly invent, launch, try, fail, do, redo, start over, rethink, repeat again and again.
But there was much more in those letters than these three inspiring principles. In particular two letters resonated with me, giving concrete tips to use in my quest of becoming the best product person that I can be.
Image by Christian Wiediger from Unsplash
The first one is the 2017 letter about creating a culture of high standards: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e8Tzmb2hA1htlQ_YSUu4xWN5AHqDDi8Q/view
My main takeaway here is that you can’t raise the bar for your customers if you do not first raise the bar for yourself. As a product person, you relentlessly have to work to make everyone around you better, in order to make your product better. You always have to approach a problem with an open mind, recognizing when others know more than you do. And at the same time bring to the table your expertise and your voice. Creating a team that understands the big goal and always strives to greatness is a process that takes time, extreme focus, and practice. But is the only way to create great products.
The second one is the letter of 2005 about how to make decisions: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzVmPBUYS4gaaEdmZXRBdUpzcnM/view
The more I work with agile, the more I realize that almost everyone is really scared of being agile. We do not want to take decisions (or ship something) until we have all the information until they are ”math-safe". But not all the decisions can be math-based and sometimes spending time to collect pieces of evidence (and consensus) is a slowing-down process that is worst for the business. As Bezos puts it:
Math-based decisions command wide agreement, whereas judgment-based decisions are rightly debated and often controversial, at least until put into practice and demonstrated. Any institution unwilling to endure controversy must limit itself to decisions of the first type. In our view, doing so would not only limit controversy —it would also significantly limit innovation and long-term value creation.
The challenge to crack is how to inject a ”disagree and commit” mentality bottom-up and upper-down in order to unleash innovation.
Some thoughts to always keep in mind to make sure that for me it remains Day 1.
