Thoughts on (Amazonian) Leadership

Summary

Thoughts on (Amazonian) Leadership Amazon's Leadership Principles are famous, not just within Amazon but also in the tech world at large. While they're frequently mocked — including by Amazonians — they're also generally sensible rules by which to run a company. I've been an Amazon customer for over 25 years and an AWS customer for almost 20 years, and also an AWS Hero for 6 years, and while I've never worked for Amazon I feel that I've seen behind the curtain enough to offer some commentary on a few of these principles. Customer Obsession: Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers. Customer Obsession is great, but I often see Amazonians taking this too simplistically: "Start with the customer" doesn't have to mean "ask customers what they want and then give them faster horses". In the early days of AWS I saw a lot of what I call "cool engineering driven" products: When EC2 launched, it wasn't really clear what people would do with it, but it was very cool and it was clear that it could be a big deal in some form, sooner or later. Some time around 2012, the culture in AWS seemed to shift from "provide cool building blocks" to "build what customers are asking for" and in my view this was a step in the wrong direction (mind you, not nearly as much as the ca. 2020 shift to "build what analysts are asking for in quarterly earnings calls"). This tension of what customers are asking for vs what customers really need shows up in areas like resilience. Amazon's "Well-Architected Framework" strongly exhorts customers to avoid building production workloads in a single Availability Zone — but Amazon's cross-AZ bandwidth pricing is painful, and Amazon doesn't provide useful tools for building durable multi-AZ applications. Most customers are not going to implement Paxos, and very few customers — certainly not executives who are removed from a...