How 'day one' has stood Amazon in good stead

McNamara shares Amazon CEO Bezos' philosophies at #ready18.

At Amazon, it is always 'day one'. In a 2016 letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explained that day two equated to being in limbo, then irrelevance and decline.

Speaking at Capillary Technologies' #ready18 event for retailers in Singapore, Conor McNamara, Head of Business Development, APAC, Amazon Web Services explained some of Bezos' philosophies.

Being in day one means fighting gravity, as opposed to being in a tailwind, behind, McNamara said. Some of the gravity-defying initiatives that the company is working on right now include robotics and Amazon Go, a chain of stores in the US where there is no need to formally check out purchases. 

Another way that day one manifests is in high-velocity decision-making. Amazon believes that there are lessons in making wrong decisions, though it can be difficult to decide which decisions can be reversed, and which cannot. 

"Speed matters in business," said McNamara. "It's better to make a wrong decision than to make a slow decision."

Then there is the "two-pizza" rule, which says that team size should be limited by the number of people two pizzas can feed. McNamara shared that teams at Amazon are organised around customer outcomes, and nimble enough to be independent within the larger business. "If (the team) can't be fed on about two pizzas, then split it," he said.

He added that placing the customer at the centre of everything is very difficult to do. "It is a very good idea to have but hard to do if you are running a business," he said.

When Amazon first introduced the sale of used books alongside new books, McNamara said the user experience for used books was not as friendly as the new-book experience. Bezos suggested putting the old and new books side by side to let the customer choose, but management objected, sayingthat the practice would cannibalise the business and profits.

"He said, 'If we don't do it, somebody else will,'" McNamara said. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is another example of being customer-centric. The public cloud service is a different way to procure computing, he said. "It is what customers want and we embrace it," he said.

Care has to be taken not to fall into the trap of letting processes own the business, instead of the other way round. "Always look at the process, if it is delivering the outcomes you want it to deliver," he added.

"Act in the interest of the company, not in the interest of your own job or your own function."