Been there, done that - twice. Amazon has a tendency to spin up internal startup-like groups to try out a bunch of fairly random ideas and see which ones stick

Been there, done that - twice. Amazon has a tendency to spin up internal startup-like groups to try out a bunch of fairly random ideas and see which ones stick. As an example, I worked in one team whose brief was literally just "We want another IMDB to sell ads on, but for a different vertical. You pick." - we created a user-generated music encyclopedia because it seemed like a good idea at the time. It sank without trace after three-four years of almost-zero usage - although we did have a few fanatical users who submitted literally hundreds of thousands of edits. It was ... odd. It really is demoralizing to work on a team which is started to pursue a dubious idea with no market. You have to go in each day and ignore the nagging doubts that tell you that in two years, the team will dissolve and you'll be onto a different project. The only thing that keeps you going is that the tech is usually interesting and fun to work with, and occasionally a team can pivot onto a different idea. The aforementioned team spun off a separate team focused on getting artists to pay to customize their Amazon pages, a bit like IMDb Pro. A different team building a (doomed) external tool inspired a colleague to start a micro-team and build what became a well-loved internal content creation tool. On the other hand - while the environment isn't great for doing startup-like teams (twitchy lawyers, bureaucracy, lack of external interest because you're just another Amazon product instead of a shiny new startup), when the product fails you ultimately still have a job.