Customers often ask how can their companies innovate like Amazon. From its humble beginnings as the “World’s Largest Bookstore,” Amazon has not only innovated across e-commerce and adjacent segments within e-commerce, but also introduced new businesses that are unrelated to e-commerce. Over the years Amazon has gotten very good at taking hard problems and made them easier for the masses to use. This session will give you an insight to our Culture of Innovation and the working backwards process we use and share some ideas you can take back to your own organisations.

1. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Ivor Bradley
20 July 2018
Amazon’s Culture of Innovation
Enabling Everyone to Innovate

2. Invention comes in many forms and at many
scales. The most radical and transformative of
inventions are often those that empower
others to unleash their creativity – to pursue
their dreams
Jeffrey P. Bezos
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Amazon.com, Inc.

3. Our mission

4. Our commitment

5. Where innovation starts

6. Our culture of
innovation
» Customer Obsession
“Start every process with the customer and work backwards.”
» Long Term Thinking
“Be stubborn on the vision but flexible on the details.”
» If you want to be inventive, you have to be
willing to fail.
“We are willing to go down on a bunch of dark alleys and
occasionally we find something that really works.”
» You have to be willing to be misunderstood
for a long time.
“We are very comfortable being misunderstood.”

7. A look back at
development at
Amazon..
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/pixelthing/15806918992/

8. Amazon.com Services (theory)

9. • Single-purpose
• Connect only through
APIs
• Connect over HTTPS
• Largely “black boxes”
to each other
• “Microservices”

11. Stubborn on the vision

12. Willingness to be
misunderstood

13. Amazon Started with Books…

16. amazon vertraulich

17. How do we
organize for
innovation?
» Mechanisms
Encoded behaviors that facilitate
innovative thinking

18. Working Backwards –
PR and FAQs
Work backwards
from the customer
Press Release
FAQ
User Manual
Customer
Press
Release
User
Manual

19. Working Backwards is a process.
Use it to get clarity, not to document what
you’ve already decided to do.

20. • Who is the customer?
• What is the customer problem or opportunity?
• Is the most important customer benefit clear?
• How do you know what customers need or want?
• What does the customer experience look like?
Working Backwards - 5 Questions

21. Press releases force decisions
Puts you in the shoes of your customer
Ensures market fit

22. Say it simply
We will optimize the
customer experience to
enable enhanced accuracy in
Buy-Box pricing to facilitate
increased rapidity and
elevated confidence in
purchase decisioning by
cross-border
retail customers.
Amazon makes it easier
for international shoppers
to decide what to purchase
by showing them the
total landed cost of an item.
Total landed cost includes all
taxes, duties, and shipping
costs.

23. FAQ
• Include both customer FAQs
and stakeholder FAQs
• Include the hard questions
• Share your Press Release early
to gather questions

24. Visuals
• Rough idea – rough drawing
• Match fidelity to maturity of
your idea
• Don’t be afraid to be provocative
• Create discussion

25. Most companies write the software,
they get it all working, and then they
throw it over the wall to the
marketing department, saying ‘here is
what we built, go write the press
release.’ That process is the one that’s
actually backwards.”
Jeffrey P. Bezos
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Amazon.com, Inc.

26. How do we
organize for
innovation?
» Mechanisms
Encoded behaviors that facilitate innovative thinking
» Architecture
Structure that supports rapid growth and change

27. Self-service Platforms
without Gatekeepers
We are creating powerful self-service
platforms that allow thousands of
people to boldly experiment and
accomplish things that would
otherwise be impossible or impractical.

28. How do we
organize for
innovation?
» Mechanisms
Working Backwards Process
» Architecture
Structure that supports rapid growth and change
» Culture
Customer obsession, hire builders, let them build,
support them with a belief system

29. At Amazon, we
hire Builders and
let them build.

30. Everyone of us is a
leader on our
mission

31. How do we
organize for
innovation?
» Mechanisms
Encoded behaviors that facilitate innovative thinking
» Architecture
Structure that supports rapid growth and change
» Culture
Customer obsession, hire builders, let them build,
support them with a belief system
» Organization
Small, empowered teams that own what they create

32. Culture of
Experimentation:
We Give Our People
Freedom To Innovate
Joi Ito
“Want to increase innovation?
Lower the cost of failure”
Rapid iteration –

33. The
Institutional
YES!

34. Learn from failures…

35. How do we
organize for
innovation?
» Mechanisms
Encoded behaviors that facilitate innovative thinking
» Architecture
Structure that supports rapid growth and change
» Culture
Customer obsession, hire builders, let them build,
support them with a belief system
» Organization
Small, empowered teams that own what they create

36. Amazon Achieves Speed and Agility with Two-Pizza Teams
Small,
decentralized
teams are nimble
Own/run
what you
build
Fosters Ownership & Autonomy

37. Innovation at the edge

38. Innovation manifested across so many domains…
Drone Development
Advanced Shopping
Kindle Reader In-house
Entertainment
Grocery Delivery
Video Streaming
Home AutomationCloud Computing

39. We had three big ideas at Amazon that we
have stuck with for 20+ years, and they are
the reason we are successful: put the
customer first, invent and be patient.
Jeffrey P. Bezos
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Amazon.com, Inc.

40. Thank you