Amazon Web Technologies CEO Adam Selipsky has been there almost from the beginning: He joined in 2005, left in 2016 after 11 years at Amazon to run Tableau, and became Amazon Web Technologies CEO in 2021. Andy Jassy, the former chief executive of Amazon Cloud Technologies at the time, succeeded Jeff Bezos as Amazon's chief executive.
The following is the content of an exclusive interview with Amazon Cloud Technology CEO Adam Selipsky by the editor-in-chief of the technology media The verge.
How to Make Decisions in Amazon Cloud Technology
Reporter: Amazon does have a very strong set of leadership principles and a very clear decision-making process. It sounds like you're saying that you want to be in a "Day one" mentality at all times, not a "Day two protective mentality. What is your decision-making framework? How do you make decisions?
Adam: This is a difficult question to answer in the abstract, but let me try. You mentioned Amazon’s leadership principles, we have 16 of them. I sometimes call it Amazon's operating system. We apply these leadership principles when recruiting. So if I'm doing a round robin interview, I might be assigned "hold to the highest standards" or "think big" or "learn and be curious". I would actually be interviewing for this leadership principle. It really became part of everyday speech, it became part of Amazon's vocabulary. They are very important. If I had to choose one, Amazon's true core is the customer-first leadership principle.
To answer your question, I think the way we (myself of course) make decisions is always from the customer's point of view. By the way, people have misconceptions - I've learned that when people say customer-centric, or when we say customer-obsessed, they mean something different. I think a lot of people think the way you show that is on an emotional level. "Don't I like my customers?" As far as I know, there are some very traditional IT competitors who don't seem to like their customers. Or you may like your customers, or you may love your customers, and people think that's what true customer centricity is.
But what I've learned is that you can't measure this on an emotional scale, and the most customer-centric thing you can really do is twofold. One, get to know your customers deeply in a way that most companies don't take the time to do. Sure, they send out a survey, or have a product manager talk to some customers, but they don't have a deep understanding of what exactly their customers are having problems with, or exactly what they think of the product you've built so far view.
And then the second part, which is actually harder than the first part, is taking that understanding and really putting it at the center of the decision. It's that simple. You have a complete picture of the customer, and then when you price something, you say, "Oh, well, how do I maximize profit for me? What do I need to do?" I see that in a lot of Companies, when they make their most important decisions, they just routinely leave customer information at the door.
When making decisions, we make sure to keep the client's perspective at the center of the room. The way we do this is to work the process backwards. So anytime we're building something, not just a big new service, or even a mid-sized feature of an existing service, we actually write the press release before the developers start coding. If we can't describe in simple words how exciting and groundbreaking this thing we want to build for our clients is, why on earth are we wasting our time building it?
You can also clear up all kinds of misunderstandings between the teams. Are we building this for developers? Are we building it for IT staff? Is this for line of business users? How high are we going to build in the stack? Will it build on our original service? Do we need new technology? Here's a press release followed by a detailed FAQ behind that press release. We do this dozens or hundreds of times a year. That way we know we're about to start building something that will at least deliver great performance to our customers. This may be at the heart of our decisions.
Another thing for me personally is to hear a lot of voices. I really enjoy taking in a lot of different perspectives. I don't think the people closest to me, the most senior, always have the best ideas, or the sharpest opinions on something. I would push and ask people to justify and defend what they said. That's very important to me and helps us get on the same page. Or, if we can't agree, at least empower senior decision makers with as much knowledge as possible to make a decision.
How to Make Decisions in Amazon Cloud Technology
Reporter: Please tell me how you brought Amazon cloud technology to a new scale? We want to reduce the size of the organization. Is this your decision? How did you put it into practice?
Adam: Let me start off by saying that any time you have to lay off staff, it's going to be very painful. You're dealing with people's lives, their livelihoods, but also their families. We take it very seriously and understand how it affects people. So I don't want to minimize this in any way. The number of employees of Amazon cloud technology is growing extremely rapidly. Just from 2020 to the end of 2022, Amazon Cloud Technology has added tens of thousands of employees. And then, earlier this year, as we looked at the overall economic uncertainty, the macroeconomic environment and our real desire to focus on the most important priorities, we did end up doing some small single-digit layoffs.
We made the decision: How can we increase efficiency while being confident that we still have a lot of potential for innovation? We try to be more and more aware of what our real priorities are. We've grown so fast, so we've done a lot of things. I think anytime you're in a situation like this, step back every now and then and say, "What's our top priority? What's the most important service to our customers?"
In many cases, we're just moving people and teams around so we can focus on our most important priorities this year—not because something's bad, or because they're bad ideas, but simply because we've decided to focus on our biggest priorities. important things. In a few cases, we will eliminate these roles if we do not have enough of the required skills in a particular field. In our highest priority areas, we still have open positions that are being filled, and we are laying off employees who do not have existing skills.
Reporter: You are talking about reorganizing Amazon cloud technology and redoing priorities. What is the current architecture of Amazon cloud technology?
Adam: We have been and continue to be very decentralized in terms of our product. We optimize for innovation and speed. Speed is often underestimated. I think people greatly underestimate the importance and power of speed. They are also very fatalistic about it. I often hear clients say, "We're just a slow company. We don't have the ability to be agile." I tell them that speed is a choice. You can choose the speed of action, and that choice depends on a number of factors: how you organize, how many and what types of people you have, and what senior leaders want their teams to insist on.
There is a series of events that will happen very soon. One of them is organization. We chose to build what we commonly call separable teams. So we want the team to be as independent as possible. Now, of course, teams do depend on each other, but there can be less. We chose to decompose and restructure teams as much as possible to make them as autonomous as possible. They control their own destiny as much as possible.
Another key concept is single threading. If you take an existing successful business and the leader of that business, and then give that person a new project to work on, it's almost inevitable that that project will struggle because they have a revenue stream, business, and operations to keep them afloat.
Instead, what we tend to do is take super-successful leaders out of what they're doing and get them to focus on something new. That way, it gets 100% of its attention. So we do have a lot of general managers in small businesses or product areas who are responsible for both development and product management, those types of functions. When unified under one leader, they move much faster than we have some large, single functional structures.
Now, in terms of going to market, we don't want to be in front of customers with 200 separate services. So in terms of go-to-market, we're more structured around organization by industry vertical or geographic region. But we'll always have an account owner who acts as a lead for the client, bringing in various experts for different products or different types of technical topics. That way we can show as much of Amazon's cloud technology as possible.