The first one attracted a grand total of eight people. We decided to host an Amazon software developer conference in our Seattle headquarters. Since we did not have much experience creating programs for software developers, we sought in-person feedback from heavy users of the service. One anectode that got me cracking is the first in-person feedback session on the earlierĪmazon APIs (aka XML product feeds), where someone who would then go on to have Another key takeway for me is focusing on input, as opposed to output, Things down, I also recognize how important is to think things through, and theįact that too many times I hit the ground running without a coherent and cohesive I also liked the practical examples around 6-pagersĪs well as PR/FAQ documents: while I do believe too much narrative can slow The journey from a XML product feed to AWS (it’s brief, so don’t expect a lotĪround AWS in this book).

I really enjoyed reading about the single-threaded leadership model (re-inforced my thoughts), as well as Problems we face while going through the same exact journey (even thoughĪmazon’s problems are at planet-scale, while we mostly limit to our region). It was incredibly insightful - for me, working at a high-growth, large-scaleĬompany in a similar space, it provided a lot of key information about It’s probably hard to write a unidirectional story and instead should focus onĪ bunch of anectodes (or mini-stories), which is what the authors do here, and Honest, when you have to handpick a bunch of winning strategies for a company, The book is really strange, in the sense that there doesn’t really seem to beĪn agenda and is instead a bunch of chapters about what the authors thinkĬreated great competitive advantage for Amazon, loosely tied together.

Little did I know this would be a great read, even though the style of the book Time to go back digging into my Kindle library.Ī book that revolves around Amazon’s culture, its unique approach to solving organizationalĬhallenges and its pragmatic (albeit innovative) approaches to product development. I just got back from a week-long restorative holiday, where I found some

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