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: One thing I will never forget is -about a month into a new role leading a product team at Amazon- getting an email from my boss that is a forward of an email Bezos sent him. The email that Bezos sent read as follows: “?”. That was it…(1/n)
: One thing I will never forget is -about a month into a new role leading a product team at Amazon- getting an email from my boss that is a forward of an email Bezos sent him. The email that Bezos sent read as follows: “?”. That was it…(1/n)
.... Attached below the "?" was an email from a customer to Jeff telling him he (the customer) finds it painful to find a certain type of products on Amazon although Amazon has them and asking him why this is the case...(2/n)
..."?" email from Jeff is known in Amazon & it even has its own wiki on how to handle it but that's a story for another time. While all emails Jeff gets from customers get a response and follow up, not all of them get personally forwarded by him to execs by him with a "?"...(3/n)
It was astonishing that he picked that one email about a seemingly trivial issue and a very small category of products to personally zoom in on. I kept asking myself why as we dug into the problem...(4/n)
...Since I owned that part of the business I had to write a response to him with a plan. As we unbundled the problem I started realizing how it is a "representative problem". A problem that is small but uncovers a deeper opportunity to improve things structurally...(5/n)
...The kind of products the customer was complaining about finding was a spec-heavy, not brand-driven type. We quickly realized that a) typical search wasn't enough for those and b) there were so many of those other than the small pocket the customer had brought up...(6/n)
...it ended up being a multi-year product undertaking with large teams of PMs and engineers going after it piece by piece. It still amazes me to think that the CEO of a company as big as Amazon was able to zoom in on this top-down...(7/n)
...That's why building sound judgment/intuition is 10x more important than just skills. It was the embodiment of the Amazon principle of -leaders- "Are right, a lot". (8/8)
