I joined Amazon in 2017 for two reasons — (1) To work on new business and technology (that I never worked on in the last 16years of my career) and (2) be a part of the Amazon family given how Amazon’ified my life has become — I use Prime, Prime Now, Subscribe & Save, Credit card, Video, IMDB, Drive, Echo, FireTV, Alexa and home automation. As a software engineer, what better place to work at, than the earth’s most customer-centric company!

[Pro-Tip #1: You get 5–15% discount with Subscribe & Save and 5% cash back with Prime Credit card, all without leaving home]

After joining Amazon, I understood why product launches here are successful and how these launches add tremendous customer value. Amazon has a very unique culture and a few reasons why this works are (1) Leadership Principles (2) philosophy about building scrappy solutions and continuously iterating and improving, (3) two-pizza team structure, (4) writing (no PPT) culture, (5) working backwards and (6) building mechanisms vs. leaving to good intentions. I will be writing a bit about some of these here and for more info, follow Pro-Tip #2.

Leadership Principles (LPs) define Amazon culture. We hold ourselves and each other accountable for demonstrating the LPs through our actions “every” day. Most importantly, our LPs describe how Amazon does business, how leaders lead, and how we keep the customer at the center of our decisions. If there is ever any debate about what to do, we go back to these LPs (makes the conversations easy and logical). Whether you are an individual contributor or a manager of a large team, you are an Amazon leader.

At Amazon, written documents and not PowerPoints are the means of presentation. Written documents emphasize substance over style, force organization and clarity of thought, give control to the reader, generate better questions and feedback, and create a timeless reference.

Most software engineers (want to) do this (especially in startups and early stage of their projects) — finish an MLP and iterate as needed. At Amazon, we build quick scrappy solutions and get customer feedback which provides the ammunition to improve. It’s rewarding to see things in action almost instantly. This helps engineers innovate faster.

[Pro-Tip #2: Even if you don’t want to work for Amazon, but want to start something of you own or work for a non-profit organization or a corporation, I recommend you know more about what’s listed above. Talk to an Amazonian! Please ping me! I’d love to share what I learnt so far].

I believe that these should be taught in all schools, a reason why I reached out to my alma-mater, University of Washington, Foster school of Business (#GoHuskies) to see if they want me to talk about Amazon’s culture to the MBA students.

[Pro-Tip #3: Just like how finance aficionados read Warren Buffet’s shareholder letters, if you like tech, innovation and solving customer problems, read JeffB’s shareholder letter which also includes the 1997 letter (tells you what a visionary he is)]

Amazon has many orgs, ex: AWS, Alexa and Consumer. I joined SCOT (Supply Chain Optimization Tech) — which is part of the Consumer org. Two reasons I chose SCOT are (1) a completely new domain and (2) there is NO place in the world that does what SCOT does, hands down.

SCOT is an org where business, research and engineering come together to enhance customer experience. We operate large scale (millions of products, thousands of vendors, hundreds of warehouses, millions of users and orders across many continents) distributed systems running ML and linear programming models to help automate supply chain decisions. Our systems predict customer demand, decide how much to procure, who to get products from, when to procure, where to store (which warehouse) and how to ship (with different delivery options ex: 2hr delivery) products to customers — all of this is automatically handled by the software we write and the models we build. Many design patterns and (math) optimizations we use don’t exist anywhere, we create them.

[Pro-Tip #4: Did you know you can sell using Amazon? That’s called FBA]

[Pro-Tip #5: Tour an Amazon warehouse and see SCOT in action]