Hassan Chaudry - Amazon's Product Framework

WANT TO KNOW AMAZON'S

PRODUCT FRAMEWORK ?

Well, so do I.

Let's figure out together:

In 2017, someone asked Jeff Bezos, "How the Day 2 should look like?" Bezos replied, Day 2 is death, decline and destruction! There shouldn't be a Day 2 after the Day 1. That is why from Day 1, Amazon has been maintaining its innovation oriented startup culture to build state of the art products.

🔑The Key to Maintaining Day 1 Culture in Amazon

Customer Obsession and Swift Decision Making rule the roost when it comes to maintaining the Day 1 culture in Amazon.

Day 1 vs Days 2 Culture According to the Cameron and Quinn’s Competing Values (CQV) Framework ?

The CQV framework defines companies following the Day 1 culture as driven by adhocracy and customer prioritization. On the other hand, companies following the Day 2 Culture, prioritize processes, ambivalent to external trends, reliant on proxies and marred in indecisions.

Its needless to say that as compared to the Day 2 culture, Day 1 organizational culture sits right in the middle of product innovation and creativity.

Amazon's Approach to Retain the Agile Team Design: Two Pizza Team

How does Amazon retains an Agile Team Structure? Well they have adopted the concept of Tw-Pizza Team to step in the shoes of the clients, avoid indecisions and master the craft of prioritization. The underlying concept here is that no team should be larger than what two pizzas can feed.

A McKinsey & Company study conducted in different companies has also testified to the fact that small teams uphold the Agile principles to a greater extent, are dominated by swift decision-making, innovation and high performance.

A Single Thread Owner (STO): a Head of Agile Team at Amazon

Single-Threaded Owner (STO) leads a Two -Pizza team or teams. This strategy prioritizes a single enterprise project at a time and cuts through distractions.

Given the fast-paced nature of the business, Amazon conducts regular weekly, monthly, and quarterly business reviews, along with roadmap and program reviews. These reviews enable Single-Threaded Owners (STOs) to evaluate deliverables and make adjustments to their plans.

More importantly, STOs are sensitized with the broader organizational goals and practice the liberty to take strategic decisions within their sphere of influence.

Amazon’s Working Backwards process: a recipe for Innovation & Simplification

Amazon's Working Backward Process involves the following ceremonies before allocating budget to any new project:

Playing with the proposed feature's idea by writing a detailed Press Release. The Press Release is totally geared towards the customer, their expectations and opinions. The Press Release is open for multiple refinements with the intent of improvement.
Writing FAQs
Writing Product Manual
Amazon Hackathons: It is sort of an internal huddle at Amazon where people collaborate and brainstorm to decide on product features, propose solutions, ideas, launch prototypes etc.

Just to mention, in the last decade or so, every product launched by Amazon (be it Amazon Prime or Alexa) were watered-downed and refined through Press Releases and FAQs.

In Nutshell

Amazon's guide to manage Agile Teams, through STOs and other approaches are at the core, meant to have a better understanding of client's pain trigger points, facilitate swift decision-making and balance competing organizational priorities.

References:

Amazon Corporate (2017). 2016 Letter to Shareholders.
George, P. (2016). The scary truth about corporate survival

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