Most of the people who read this blog likely already know this, but for those who don’t it’s worth making public.
Last Friday — March 20, 2009 — was my final day working at one of the greatest, most innovative and well-run companies in the world: Amazon.com. This comes after three years of full-time work and a summer internship in 2005. Surprisingly (or not, if you know Amazon’s growth), that made me older than something like 80% of all Amazon employees in Seattle, the headquarters (and older than a much higher percentage of ALL Amazon employees).
I wanted to write up a quick note about my experiences at Amazon as well as some hints as to what’s in store next for me.
In my opinion (which is, admittedly, very biased since Amazon has been the only company I’ve ever worked for full-time) Amazon is perhaps one of the greatest companies led by one of the most brilliant CEO’s and leadership team in the world.
During my final one-on-one with my manager, he asked me what my biggest takeaways from my time at Amazon were. It wasn’t a question I had necessarily thought about before that time, but it didn’t take me too long to come to an answer:
Customer obsession is the single most important asset you can have as a company. Every second of every day you should be able to know exactly why you are working on whatever it is you are working on and how that helps the customer. What about it makes their life easier and their experience with your company better?
I worked as a software developer on the Email Platform team. That meant, among other things, we were responsible for sending massive amounts of marketing and transactional mail to customers. Obviously, not all customers find this to be the greatest experience, so it was particularly important for our team to ensure that we did not send spam, and we targeted each mail directly to those customers who would be interested in receiving the mail. The words “customer experience” were perhaps two of the most uttered words on our team each and every day.
Frugality and Innovation are not only both extremely important, but also work hand-in-hand. One of Amazon’s core values is Frugality. In my opinion, this was born out of necessity and intelligence. It’s no secret that Amazon didn’t make a profit for quite some time and the media was predicting their demise (Amazon.bomb), so they simply couldn’t spend money frivolously. Anywhere they could save money, they did; even including the desks they give to employees (“door desks” made out of 4x4”s for legs and a door for the top). They worked hard and spent little to become the successful, profitable, respected company they are today.
But, I don’t think this is the only reason Frugality is a core value. Amazon’s focus on customer experience means that they are always trying to lower prices. If the company can do something more cheaply and pass those savings on to the customer, they will.
This focus on frugality means that the company has to be highly innovative. It it always trying to find new ways to do things more cheaply and efficiently in every aspect of the business. Amazon is a well-oiled machine in that regard. They never stop exploring and never settle for the status quo as the only way to do things. From my vantage point, the rate of change at Amazon is unrivaled.
These two core values from Amazon will last a lifetime and will be there in every subsequent job I do.
If you’re wondering what’s next, I’m not going to spill the beans on everything quite yet, since it’s all still very early, but I’ve begun working with a couple great and super-smart folks on a project I’m really, really excited about.
