Anyone whose worked at amazon isn’t going to be surprised by this. Much of Amazon’s retail/consumer organization is heavily product management driven. PMs are

Anyone whose worked at amazon isn’t going to be surprised by this. Much of Amazon’s retail/consumer organization is heavily product management driven. PMs are under pressure and incentivized to release features or somehow show impact that translates into some bottom line metric. If you can show your work attributed X% decrease in cancellations or Y% increase in bottom line profit, especially with a small engineering team, that’s your fastest path to promotion. This leads to a culture of churning out “features”, often at the expense of the end product or the expense of customers. I guarantee you there were a/b test results that were summarized and twisted around in a document, presenting the test results as a net win for customers. And there are second and third order effects - constant tweaks and duct tape on top of monolithic systems that prevent Amazon from being innovative. The company makes shockingly little investment in this area, and when you couple that with engineers constantly churning, it becomes clear that product teams deliver some dark pattern or other unhelpful feature because the poorly strung together architecture limits any real innovation. The engineers may have their own opinions, but at the end of the day nobody gives a shit about what they think except on design and scale concerns. What’s the operational/support cost of X? If we promise Y to our leadership, can we deliver it by this date? Most of the recent hiring when I left, especially for engineers, were study abroad students from China or India. They wouldn’t say anything being afraid not to rock the boat, especially because of their work situation. If a manager puts them on a development plan, they will most likely get fired and have to leave the US. The company has found this structure so advantageous to its business that if not for Indian and Chinese talent, in my opinion, Amazon in its current cultural state would implode.