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I'd like to know how Amazon manages and organizes themselves with respect to leadership, teams, hierarchy, knowledge sharing and integration between different

I'd like to know how Amazon manages and organizes themselves with respect to leadership, teams, hierarchy, knowledge sharing and integration between different internal and external groups with everything they do and all of their business units. The fact that they succeed here is more amazing than any of the tech.

losteric 9y ago
In my experience, Amazon is very good about focusing managers on facilitating talent and trusting engineers with implementation. Not in all orgs, granted, but the innovative / experimental ones are very engineering driven... even the managers generally have some first-hand engineering experience. They're also good about keeping projects under single org trees - senior engineers act as executors of the VP's will, bypassing slow human management chains. If a team slips on their roadmap, the senior engineer can immediately intervene to provide unblocking advice (possibly looping in other experts) and coordinating scheduling changes with dependent teams... that shadow technical hierarchy is very powerful. It's let some VPs / directors reorg every couple months to shift out bad people managers, knowing tactical implementation isn't being interrupted. Knowledge management... I've heard Google is much better. Amazon's infrastructure is well documented, but bleeding-edge projects can be hit-or-miss. Their forte is strong separation of responsibilities... which usually means tribal knowledge. edit: I say "engineering" because I am one... but it's not just engineering. Amazon management focuses on hiring smart people they can trust to operate autonomously. That means less bureaucratic red tape, flat(ish) management chains, and effective direct communication. Talking "through" management, escalation, is a seen as a last-resort.
petra 9y ago
The key to Amazon's organization is that they are built deeply on the startup mentality, where a small group of talented people that go after an opportunity, give them access to great tools/platforms/data via standard building blocks like AWS/FBA/Amazon's site and data and actually everything at amazon is built of microservices(they can mix and match), allow them to experiment but measure performance, push for speed, and don't put any bureaucracy on them. And once it's time for scaling, Amazon is great at that. And of course, if it's possible, create new building blocks for the next startups. But also, a big part of Amazon is risk management. Building platforms(like FBA), that leaves the risky stuff(like importing) to others. And using the data from that platform to reduce risks for it's own startups.
notriddle 9y ago
Isn't Amazon basically the SoA empire, where departments are basically customers of each other, and every service should be ready to be made available to the public at all times?

losteric 9y ago

In my experience, Amazon is very good about focusing managers on facilitating talent and trusting engineers with implementation. Not in all orgs, granted, but the innovative / experimental ones are very engineering driven... even the managers generally have some first-hand engineering experience. They're also good about keeping projects under single org trees - senior engineers act as executors of the VP's will, bypassing slow human management chains. If a team slips on their roadmap, the senior engineer can immediately intervene to provide unblocking advice (possibly looping in other experts) and coordinating scheduling changes with dependent teams... that shadow technical hierarchy is very powerful. It's let some VPs / directors reorg every couple months to shift out bad people managers, knowing tactical implementation isn't being interrupted. Knowledge management... I've heard Google is much better. Amazon's infrastructure is well documented, but bleeding-edge projects can be hit-or-miss. Their forte is strong separation of responsibilities... which usually means tribal knowledge. edit: I say "engineering" because I am one... but it's not just engineering. Amazon management focuses on hiring smart people they can trust to operate autonomously. That means less bureaucratic red tape, flat(ish) management chains, and effective direct communication. Talking "through" management, escalation, is a seen as a last-resort.

petra 9y ago

The key to Amazon's organization is that they are built deeply on the startup mentality, where a small group of talented people that go after an opportunity, give them access to great tools/platforms/data via standard building blocks like AWS/FBA/Amazon's site and data and actually everything at amazon is built of microservices(they can mix and match), allow them to experiment but measure performance, push for speed, and don't put any bureaucracy on them. And once it's time for scaling, Amazon is great at that. And of course, if it's possible, create new building blocks for the next startups. But also, a big part of Amazon is risk management. Building platforms(like FBA), that leaves the risky stuff(like importing) to others. And using the data from that platform to reduce risks for it's own startups.

notriddle 9y ago

Isn't Amazon basically the SoA empire, where departments are basically customers of each other, and every service should be ready to be made available to the public at all times?