Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explains Amazon's team philosophy and why scaling startups should build self-organizing, independent teams without management hierarchy.
Insight
Werner Vogels: Amazon accepts duplication and technical debt to maximize speed
“At Amazon, moving fast and innovating fast, and having a very long pipeline of experiments, that's the more and most important thing, so you're willing to allow duplication to happen, you're allowed to create technical debt, as long as you know that you have t…”
Insight
Werner Vogels: Engineer-led product development results in pure technology, not actual products
“If you're a heavy technology company, lots of engineering, there's a risk that the engineers get in charge. Yeah? If they get in charge, you do not necessarily build products, you build technology.”
Insight
Werner Vogels: Mercenary and missionary startups require fundamentally different tech architectures
“Jeff often makes the distinction between mercenaries and missionaries. Yeah? Mercenaries are the startup founders that are in it for the money. Yeah? And missionaries are the ones that are in it for the love of the product. Yeah? I want to build this product, …”
Insight
Werner Vogels: Median latency is useless; engineers must optimize the 99th percentile
“A medium latency of, let's say, 1.2 seconds off your webpage to your customers doesn't say anything. Just says that 50% of your customers have a worse experience. You need to know how much worse. And then, from an engineer, so for example, the 99 percentile or…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Werner Vogels: Early startups failed due to physical IT infrastructure costs
“So most of those companies that were initially successful around the Amazon catalog
All failed.
And they didn't fail because they didn't have great ideas.
They failed because they couldn't get their IT staff ready, or get the money to actually do, do, do, d…”
Disclosure
Werner Vogels: Major investments must materially move the Amazon balance sheet
“Then at Amazon you have to rule that if you do that, If it's going to be successful, it needs to be successful in a way that has significant impact on the Amazon balance sheet. Now, it's not that we're interested in another, let's say, ah, that sounds coy, but…”