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I was a Product Manager at @Amazon for about 3 years. Here are the Top 10 things I learned there that set the company apart from their peers 
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1/ Leadership Principles: These are company values deeply embedded into the culture and serve as vocabulary to evaluate employees, projects and candidates. Some are obvious (e.g. Deliver Results, Think Big, Customer Obsession) but others aren't (Disagree & Commit, Dive Deep)
2/ Document Writing: Nearly every meeting at Amazon starts by silently reading a document written by the organizer. On the surface this sounds awkward AF. But writing a document forces clear thinking and concrete proposals & reading ensures everyone's on the same page
3/ Sense of Urgency: The death of “big” companies is usually when they slow down and stop shipping lots of new stuff quickly. Wo counter balance this, at Amazon, shipping quickly is valued over almost everything else including product quality, work life balance and team alignment
4/ Operational Excellence: When there are livesite bugs that affect customers, “on call” engineers get paged on evenings or weekends. Teams have painful weekly reviews to deeply root cause what happened through "5 Whys" and devise plans for prevention
5/ Decoupling: At Amazon teams work pretty independently using whatever tools, tech and strategies suit them. Systems are built to support scaling of effort (eg. to ship a new category on the mobile shopping app, we didn’t need mobile app team to write a single line of code)
6/ Weekly Business Review: a walk though of key metrics with every leader on the team. Metrics owners come prepared with explanation why they missed their metrics and what they're doing about it. Not fun, but nothing crystalizes priorities like potential for team embarrassment
7/ Structured Promotions: There are very specific things you must do to be promoted + get support of ppl at the next level. When SDE gets to L6, they know their shit. The downside is that great devs may get passed over for things outside their control (eg. their feature was cut)
8/ Annual Planning: Every year teams must create and review a doc with the executive team which outlines in excruciating detail past performance & future plans. Operating Plan 1 is a 6 page doc (with unlimited appendices :) and can result in team growth or death
9/ Data Driven: Most companies do this now, but it's extreme at Amzn, applied to everything from candidate eval to user testing. Data can be used as a tool for reversing any decision, no matter the seniority of the decision maker.
10/ Your culture is your People: Amazon is full of smart people, many self selecting into this intense place. Not for everyone, but you can't deny the results: a culture that has scaled with the size of the business.
Read more on my medium post: https://medium.com/@samirlakhani/things-i-liked-about-amazon-4495ef06fbda
Read more on my medium post: https://medium.com/@samirlakhani/things-i-liked-about-amazon-4495ef06fbda
