Next week, I will be celebrating 4 months with AWS - Amazon Web Services. As I reflect on my journey so far, this continues to be one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. It is really inspiring how we Amazonians continue to hold each other accountable for demonstrating the Leadership Principles through our actions every day. If you are not familiar with the Amazon Leadership Principles, they describe how Amazon does business, how leaders lead, and we keep the customer at the center of decisions.

So how is it so far?

Before, I answer this, the observations below are through the lens of my personal experience and only represent my opinion and not Amazon’s.

• Day 1 excitement and nervousness! I felt super nervous and excited and I think it is fair to feel like that. As a new Amazonian, I had to learn new mechanisms, adapt to a peculiar culture, and get to meet lots of the brightest minds in the industry. I strive to be successful and insist on the highest standards in my work so I was curious to know who to meet, what should I read, what tools do we use, what are the key projects, what are my priorities etc.… Fortunately this was all very well-structured. The responses were curated and tailored for me as a set of content to follow by day/week/month. This honestly made it all super easy to “embark” on journey as an Amazonian. Another delightful experience was when did my on-boarding actually started. It was well ahead of my start date, where I had all my IT equipment and documentation completed before my start date. In a typical Amazon Prime magic, you order it and it shows up at your door the next day.
• A Culture Shock! When I joined one of my first team meetings at Amazon, it was an awkward dead silence on the call. I was wondering when will the presentation start. It was at that moment I started experiencing the Amazon writing culture. At Amazon, meetings to do not with PowerPoint slides but with narratively structured memos. So we would dedicate the first portion of the meeting for reading time, prior to starting the discussion. Writing memos forces us to think through the ideas in deep detail. Instead of wasting time with impromptu brainstorming sessions, or stepping through a slide deck, writing memos ensures that group discussion is based on the critical review of the relevant ideas and decision making. This got me to appreciate writing much more, and writing the Amazon way encourages you to Think Big and Dive deep into the details
• Not a cog! Ownership is one of the leadership principles and Amazonians are encouraged to constantly lead positive change for our customers. As a Product Manager I have end to end responsibility for my product area. I got to witness that AWS feels like a large grouping of many independent start-ups, so regardless of where you sit you fair amount of influencing positive change. We all constantly work backwards from the customers and needs and collaborate with the necessary peers and leaders for high-velocity decision making. We don’t deliberate much over easily reversible decisions, which we call two-way doors. At Amazon it’s OK to be wrong and also not to worry as much about being wrong because we learn from our failures and develop mechanisms to inspect and improve.
• Obsessing over customers. 90% of the features developed in AWS come directly from hearing about what our customers need. The other 10% comes from being close enough to customers that we can invent on their behalf when they don’t, or can’t, articulate those needs. As Product Manager and someone who is deeply passionate about product management, customer centricity is paramount in my role and it is so inspiring to be part of a culture where the customer is the center of the universe and product improvements are directly inspired by our customers.
• Upside-down management. At AWS people on the ground facing our customers, resolving issues and involved with the details are the ones making the decisions. The Amazon planning process is divided into a bi-annual process dubbed OP-1 (Operating Plan) and OP-2. OP-1 input is a six-page document produced by every team’s Product Managers. The input into this document is curated from customers, engineers, support and front liners. We get the opportunity to Think Big about our business and what outlook should look like. Eventually this gets reviewed by our leadership for approval. This goes in the exact opposite direction of the traditional corporate planning where it all comes top down from the executives and senior leadership to the teams for what they should be working on.
• Working with the best talent. I am surrounded by the strongest talent in the tech industry, after all AWS and it’s front doors AWS Identity are serving the world’s most valuable properties on the internet. I had the privilege in my short 4 months to seek out diverse perspectives and learn a lot about our latest innovations. This helps me feed a lot of my curiosity and passion to dig into the details. It is inspiring to be alongside peers that share the same personal values whether that is represented in how everyone embodies the Leadership Principles or the level or passion they carry coming to work every day.
• It is still #Day1. Day 1 is both a culture and an operating model that puts the customer at the center of everything Amazon does. Day 1 is about being constantly curious, nimble, and experimental. It means being brave enough to fail if it means that by applying lessons learnt, we can better surprise and delight customers in the future.

Thank you for all those who made this journey exciting from the start. I am really looking forward to a bright future here with AWS.

“Work hard. Have fun. Make history” – Jeff Bezos