Scaling Innovation at Scale

Shared Customer Obsession

• Customer obsession is one of the most important leadership principles at Amazon
• Shared customer obsession means that all teams have a deep understanding and knowledge of the customer
• A critical platform capability to drive customer innovation is a customer data platform (CDP) that provides shared customer insights and knowledge across teams
• This allows teams to deliver coherent and personalized experiences for customers throughout their journey

Insist on the Highest Standards

• Technical debt can be a major bottleneck to innovation as companies scale
• It can degrade customer experience, lower profits, and frustrate good engineers and product managers
• To address this:
  • Align teams to customer outcomes when prioritizing technical debt
  • Use tools like feature flagging, version control, and AI-powered code analysis to manage technical debt
  • Emphasize technical and business collaboration on debt prioritization
  • Leverage services like AWS CodeGuru, CodeWhisperer, and Database Migration Service

Small Autonomous Teams

• Conway's Law states that system design mirrors organization design
• Loosely coupled teams aligned to loosely coupled software systems is key for optimizing innovation
• Teams should own the entire lifecycle of the systems they develop, from customer vision to operation and iteration
• This allows teams to stay close to customers and innovate at the edge

Mechanisms to Promote Ideas from Anywhere

• Having well-defined, repeatable processes (mechanisms) is key for capturing and scaling innovation
• Amazon's "working backwards" process allows anyone to pitch and test ideas, with a path to funding and scaling
• Mechanisms should include both qualitative customer discovery and quantitative experimentation at scale
• Platform capabilities like self-service experimentation can enable this across the organization

Putting it All Together

• Key platform capabilities to enable these principles:
  • Customer data platform (CDP)
  • Continuous refactoring and modernization tools
  • API-driven, modular architecture
  • Mechanisms for customer discovery and experimentation
• Focus on data foundations, team/architecture alignment, and AI-powered capabilities as products for internal teams