How Amazon Builds High Performing Teams

I popped this out of studio mode and into two camera mode. Let's go early. Why not? So, hey, everyone. I'm here with returning guest Stefan Haney, who came just before Christmas. We talked about product management. That was very popular. We had a lot of people interested in that. Stefan can introduce himself, but he spent a long time at Amazon.

where among other things he quarterbacked the detail page which is the main page on amazon where you get to click the buy button so from an amazon viewpoint it's where all the money comes from and they cared a lot about every pixel on it. And at the same time, thousands of people, including me, were always petitioning to change it to be our way. We needed to have this, we needed to have that. And so he was at the nexus of that.

exciting process. I'm sure it was fantastic at all times. But today what we want to talk about is how Amazon structures teams. And I think... a little bit i want to motivate why why should you care because not all of you are managers and not all of you want to be managers and build teams yourselves so why would you care um basically

I think the reason to care, and you can jump in, is it lets you figure out if the team you're on has a chance of success and how good. And what can you do if you need to change that? How well organized is your team? Is it set up for success? There are things you can bring in even if you're not the manager. You can ask the right questions. You can propose the right changes.

And if you're looking for a job or you're in a job and you recognize that your team is hopelessly ill structured, you can pull the ripcord. And so, yeah, exactly. Because there's a lot of a lot of options in life. So it wouldn't be fair though. I'm going to switch views here real quick and then I'll let Stefan finish introducing himself What I want to do real quick is just show his company uh so he has his own very spiffy website i love it let me i'm doing a bad job managing my windows here

There's some good hiking in that picture that we may have overlapped. His website is vantageleader.com. And what, this is a view of the bridge over... the columbia river over the columbia river at the city of vantage right yes yes is this taken from the bottom of frenchman coulis roughly uh that would probably be about where we were yeah or the winery were you at the winery there i was not at the winery at that one um i've done a fair amount of bicycle uh

touring uh and i've i've ridden my bike we're from chicago and michigan so we've done i-90 past vantage many many times oh you drive you drive east yeah my wife loves that view she she loves that right there For me, this view is right. There is a huge, probably the best rock climbing area in Washington. Washington is not really known for great rock climbing. But this is the best rock climbing spot in Washington State is right where this picture is taken from.

yes um it's a set of basalt columns which are really interesting if you've never climbed basalt there's huge in this case six to ten foot of um across hexagonal columns and you you can climb sometimes on the face but often in the cracks between them so yeah yeah so vantageleader.com and and because you know ethan i think we talked about this last time

you know businesses are systems and systems are made of components and one of my takeaways from amazon is as i talk to clients or talk to company or people helping them change their mental model how they're you know, kind of thinking about how their businesses run, usually implicitly, is one of the biggest levers for change. And so it's, you know, it's more fun to say vantage, like, let's, let's take a look at your vantage point. Or let's take a look at your vantage on that.

and see if we can make it explicit. How are you viewing this? So that's my clients. I really appreciate it. Just quick finish the intro. I think it's a pre-qualification to have kids when you run the detail page. Certainly doesn't hurt. My wife and I have a pack of them, seven kids, seven to 18.

And that certainly prepared me for all the demands of people who wanted attention to get their priorities on the detail page. It is a privilege to have led a team or a group of teams to run the magic money button of the internet. The magic money button of the internet. That is, yeah. See, neither of us works for Amazon now, so we can make comments like that that would make PR squirm just very slightly if we were still there.

Oh, super fun. But I think the thing that preps us for this a little bit. is prior to that, I had started 2003, right? And we were on, I was in supply chain ops, which was Wilkie's org at the time. And that was a big growing, IPC or kind of the inventory planning of Amazon. That organization now is... hundreds of people i remember when it was five right and it was that's one one manager plus four people so these seeds grew into organizations

And then the same thing occurred in my time during Marketplace. I'm sure you must have seen Twitch as well. We went from the 75, 80 people to hundreds. and how you change your process and when do you decide to split a team and how do you decide to make them functional versus solution or two pizza teams plus the injection of that two pizza team idea occurred in there. Lots of kind of examples for me to think about how are you putting teams in place in your company?

Yeah, so, of course, there's a million ways to design teams. And before the show, we were just talking about the fact that one of my old colleagues, and I'm sure you knew, did you know either Colin or Bill when you were there? I knew Bill because I had worked intersected. He had a brief time when he had physical and digital. So I got to work around him at that point.

So I talked about this in my last show. My old boss Bill Carr and one of his colleagues Colin Breyer just put out a book called Working Backwards. And Working Backwards essentially, yeah, there you go. Hold it up again. Do it again. Keep it on screen a little bit. There you go. So Working Backwards is a brand new book released Tuesday. last week so a week ago um from uh two amazonians now both gone like uh stefan and i are and um

So basically, they didn't set out to tell an Amazon history. Instead, they set out to say, look, this is how Amazon works and you can actually replicate it. You can take this like a toolkit and plug it in in other places. We were already planning the show and there is a... a huge overlap between what's in the book and what we think is interesting to talk about because basically we've been trained in the same mechanisms they have.

Like I said, we're going to talk about how you can structure a team so it has a good chance of success. What kind of people do you need on it? How do you try to put the team together? and you can listen to that and if you work somewhere and look if you're a manager and i saw some of our managers check in and chat you're going to get a ton out of this and if you're a founder i know at least one of the people here is working on founding his own startup same thing

But if you're neither of those and you simply work in a team, you can use it as a scorecard of like, hey, is my team set up for success? Like what are my odds? And so you have all those choices. uh so where do you want to tackle this do you want to you you know you had this idea where would you like to start and then we can just riff on it yeah yeah um let's see we'll dive in from a side and see if that brings us around to someplace interesting sure

I'm also working on a stealth startup. We're a couple of weeks away from probably sharing more broadly. As I was working with one of the founders, we were talking about how I was thinking about the engineering team. At a company, it's kind of midsize. And he was having a hard time. We realized we're viewing it from different ways because I'm like, look, I expect the engineering team to own the business results. They're building a system.

And they need to be able to speak to that system. And in my story, you know, when I was leading the procurement team, inventory purchasing team for Amazon, if a retail category was out of stock, you know, Jeff Wilkie's collection leader would be like, Why did the software not work? And I was expected to speak in a weekly business review just as much, if maybe more, felt like more, but just as much as a category leader was.

And so that was my point of view is as you know, an engineering team needs to own the outputs of their system, they need to own the business results of their system. Turns out, as I've talked to some other clients, that's not apparently a common thing. That, you know, so, you know, do you think there's trade-offs or, you know, how are you finding it, Ethan? Am I crazy? Can I expect a software team to have

some amount of business ownership of their results of their system? I think you should expect it, but you will not often find it. There's so much of a... I was just counseling someone. Here, I'll ping you about this. If I say software team and I say IT, are those the same to you or different? This is another thing I've added to the founder. Those to me are different things. IT, to me, that's like a backbone.

back office that could be servers that could be the laptops you hand your employees could be networking but that's pretty deep infrastructure versus software to me is a different thing we're building you know so technical solutions to that are going to be operated or solve a problem yeah and so i where that came up is is a woman with a really quite stellar education and some good

experience was presenting herself as an it program manager and wondering why she was getting no bites as a tpm from a tech company and i'm like you're basically unfortunately you're presenting yourself What's that? She's like self-sidelining. She's like sidelining herself. Yeah. So hopefully I ask you that leading question because that's what I told her. And I felt a little bad because I think whether it's fair or not.

Most software and product geeks see IT and they think glorified help desk. Or they think, you know, maybe if you're above help desk, if you're working on like... deploying and connecting the oh god what I'm having a mind blink what are the systems that track all of your like costs and HR data the sure sure all your back office systems yeah yeah counting and there's an acronym for it and i'm it just fell out of my mind but um not mine yeah so um

HRMS is pure. Chat's trying to help me out. It's also when you track all of your inventory and... It's like the system you use to keep track of all your parts you've ordered and stuff like that

ERP, thank you. Kenna Rocket got it. So when I think of IT, I think like the people who set up and run the ERP system, which is a hard job and I am not diminishing it, but it's very different than software development. So if I get a resume that says IT, Program manager, I think of the person who deploys ERP, not the person who innovates necessarily new software.

coming so you think of a builder i think of an engineer i may think of you know there might be some engineering but it's a different kind of engineering correct and it's it's hard and difficult and valuable but not the same and so uh yeah i'll i'll send her this clip and be like see i just want to say like i check someone else who and your words self-sidelining is exactly what i told her

Resume content is also always super popular here. So the point is... if you're writing a resume and you have a choice depending on what you want to do if you want to be an it say it but if you don't want to be an it as we've just defined it do not say it find a way to say it's software if that's what you've done right so But what I find is the reason I ask that question is in many companies, software is lumped with IT. And if the main function of the business is...

We're a bank, or we're Procter & Gamble, or we're whoever. They don't see themselves as software companies, and what software they do have is in IT. and they don't encourage those folks to think they encourage them to take us back and deliver what's ordered and so then if you have people coming out of that environment or you go to a company with that environment they don't have the idea that they own the business results they have the idea that they take a spec and build what they're asked so

Yeah. And it's just so foreign to me because I'm like, if I have a set of people and we're trying to accomplish a mission, I want to know what the value of that mission is to what the value of that mission is to the. the P&L in the bottom or the top line of the business. And that was the interesting founder discussion that was pickling on me a little bit. He's like, well, do we need more software engineering?

you know and how would you think about that i'm like every software engineer should I should see that as a contribution to the growth of this company because they're going to build something that is going to have measurable impact on our revenue growth or our EBITDA growth by either doing a function better or by...

what its outputs are and uh yeah we were wrestling through like why is this clear to me and not clear to him like this is a smart guy he's done a bunch of stuff he's pretty accomplished but he had never looked at software that way right

He looked at us like, we have specs. Go get it done. Yeah. And... that difference we talk a lot in this channel something else you're super familiar with ownership both from the amazon ownership principle and from a book you may have seen called extreme ownership yeah um

You're basically saying you want your software teams to be owners. You want them to own the business, to have a sense that they're responsible for it, to have a sense that they are on the hook for... not did i it's not a defense see i ran this team called the amazon app store i'm sure you know about it oh yeah and i had a year where i told one of my colleagues i'm disappointed with this year

And here's why we wrote a bunch of goals. I'm going to hit all the goals and I'm not going to meaningfully improve the business. And so that's actually a failure. It means I did a shitty job on goals. But if it was possible to hit all the goals but not really improve the business, something was wrong. And that's a failure, right? That's a failure in so many ways.

uh anyway i'll let you take the ball back where do you want to so answering your question yes you should expect them to but that's a change for a lot of places yeah so you're breaking that up because i we can take that two different ways in the startup part of it obviously i have a founder stake and i i have a voice and so we're able to to poke on that and i'm able to push and go look we're going to move really fast

And we're going to grow. Yeah, Lord willing, that's where we're headed. So I want to invest that team in growing the right way. And the best way I know how is by making them owners. All the ideas don't have to come from me. And I'm essentially giving them their railroad track. And we said, hey, this railroad track is how you're going to deliver coal to the business. Feel free to identify all the opportunities and ways that you can deliver more coal.

More EBITDA, more management capability, better operations. And I'm going to check in on you. Now I can inspect periodically, but I don't have to direct as much because we're done with that. And I don't have to kind of keep the ideas spinning over here because we're invested. And so, you know, we're able to set that up on other teams. You know, when you have the IT piece. There's this functional organization, even early Amazon days, pre-fitness functions. It's going way back.

Okay, yeah, take a breath, you know, fitness functions. But, you know, this came out of that book. We're a video game engineer and, you know, meets a biologist of how do you get big and stay nimble.

you know but pre two pizza teams at amazon it was you know i owned the procurement team and we cut we cut purchase orders and i find that in a number of clients this is what we do right we cut purchase orders we calculate we run the erp we and and the question is well if you want to innovate are you too insular right have you just we've got our function we do our stove pipe really well well this is

So now we're ready for serious philosophy, right? Because we've agreed we want teams and people, not just teams, individuals who feel like they own things and have a big sense of I... I'm here as a missionary. I'm here to make the business better, to have a result, to drive an end outcome. And I want to... do good for the company and the business and the customer but how do you then put bounds on that

So on the one hand, you don't want too insular. On the other hand, you don't want boil the ocean where people are running around sticking their noses in everyone else's business unnecessarily or too expansively. The normal problem, and there's a good comment here in chat about think process, not departments. People get stuck on what's their department.

Process normally cuts across departments. Ownership often cuts across departments. But do you have a philosophy about or advice or comment or story on... where the boundaries of ownership are like how how big should i think because if i work at amazon today as an example or pick another company and i'm not the ceo there are limits to what i should worry about

Sure. Well, I think there's certainly limits in what I should worry about. But if I'm trying to... If I'm... thinking about my customers and I'm thinking about my process. right and that was a big erp thing you know i say or you know these sap was one of the first thing i was like we're thinking about the order to cash process stop thinking about accounting or accounts receivable

Think about this process. Right. And that was a mind shift to break stuff up. So, you know, if we want to bring more analytics into our system.

You know, I've gone in and said, you know what, let's try a cross-functional team. We're going to take five people for six months. And I want, you know, I want to go across the silos. I want a couple guys from the data team, a couple engineers from the... you know that are currently in the full stack team and i want two front-end engineers and oh by the way let's grab a product manager or actually let's just grab a category manager out of you know this retail category

And I get this look like you're nuts, right? Let's just keep optimizing everybody's process. And I'm like, no, no, no. We're going to invent something new. We're going to take a team. We're going to let them go for four months and see how far they get on this idea.

But it's got to be a cross-functional team. Well, why can't we just use what the data guys produce today? I'm like, well, how would we know if we want to tweak it differently? And do the front-end engineers really understand how the data is produced?

Well, they can look it up. We'll just have a meeting. And so I come back to the end. I'm sure you've done this or heard this said a couple times. We're going to take a team. We can even call it two pizza team. We're going to take a team and we're going to go see what they can invent. And see how far this idea goes. So I think that that mission piece is how is the team clear on its mission and what it delivers for customers? Because if you're not clear on that.

you almost want to go back to your, that's the boundary, right? Especially running detail page, man, everybody had a detail page idea of what was going to be a better shopping experience for their category and what I should work on. But at the end of the day, I'm like, I need to drive conversion at the platform level and components that help all of you optimize conversion in your category.

assuming conversion is the objective function, people buying more on that magic money button. So I'm going to worry about how well am I enabling you and how well am I driving the number of successful experiments? that i can do on the detail page but that took about six months to kind of really listen to my customers my internal amazon customers and work with my team to go

Why does it feel like hand-to-hand combat to listen to everybody's idea and then tell them no versus we have a system? And it was because we had lost track of what we did for our customers, our internal customers. and what our mission was as a detail page. It wasn't clear. Well, this is a good opportunity to talk about being a dependency.

In other words, so much of Amazon, so much of the book that we were just talking about working backwards written by my old boss and one of his colleagues and so much of what we're talking about. It emphasizes getting rid of dependencies. So let me just give some framework real quick. First, two pizza teams was this idea that small teams are more efficient, that everyone can sit in a room and have a mind share. And so Amazon had a model that they've moved away from in part.

called Two Pizza Teams, the idea that no team should be bigger than what can be fed by two pizzas. And these were kind of large pizzas and people with small appetites, at least compared to a lot of engineers I know. And so the idea was about 10 people. So you'd have like a product manager, a program manager, a software dev manager, and like six or seven engineers. Total of about 10.

And they wanted the leader to be this Renaissance man or woman who knew some business, knew some tech, was all over the place, had skills in everything, design, good business judgment, all kinds of things. Second, Amazon ran into this problem as we grew, and I got there right as this was happening, which is everything was tightly coupled. And so I remember when I was trying to launch Amazon Video.

what's now prime video um that the problem with prime video we needed to modify the amazon catalog uh you know the the thing that stores all the items that's for sale And when we first talked to the guy who owned the catalog team, he told us there was a year and a half wait to do anything to the catalog. And obviously you can't move fast or be agile if you have a dependency that's got a year and a half wait.

Now, I have no idea how many clients the detail page had, but it had to be hundreds. You were in the position to be that. Sorry, go ahead. I'm talking over you. At any given month, Ethan, I was a bottleneck. There were, across the course of a month, 1,100 engineers from other teams were making code changes in detail page code. And hundreds of P&Ls across the company were dependent on code changes.

Yeah. So say a little more about that. Say a little more about what you tried to do or what you learned or what you would recommend to others when you are in a situation where you have.

so many clients banging on your door because you become a central bottleneck because that should be interesting for and how should people deal with a bottleneck team besides just being better at whining or demanding than others uh more scotch and bribery no um you know which that is not a bad approach by the way being honest like relationships and but go ahead

Yeah, my team absolutely preferred working with partners more than other partners because relationships matter. But what has to happen is you run into back alley deals and how do you get resources? And that's not durable. So it's not going to last. No, but if I can interject for one second, there is a reality that I want everyone to get out of this, which is.

relationships matter in business and if you're good at building those relationships and having a positive let me help you you help me kind of relationship these teams that are in demand they have no way to win They can't meet everyone's demands. And so given they're going to disappoint some people, they'd rather help their friends and disappoint.

the people who annoy them that's just human nature and so there is you know uh the body language coming through the camera here does he just keeps going like this like yup and just realize that's true And so when you're working with a team that's overstressed, I talk about it a lot in the context of working with recruiters because recruiters always have more demand. Find me this, find me that. Sucking up to them in a positive way.

works pretty well. I would work recruit and say, I want to be your best partner. How can I help you get your job done better? By the way, I don't expect that you're going to help me staff on my position because I need to contribute not only to you, but... I know you have a lot of demand, so I'm going to be working along with you to find my people. But what inputs can I do to take a load off your back? You need bar raisers on other loops.

great, my team will help you with that, right? So how can I contribute to do that? And I'll come back to that. That was a key flip I made in how we organized, how we helped internal teams. uh but just for the context of the the chat in the audience i have yet to get to a client where they have a low backlog on a dependency team, like this dependency problem. And I often regularly also hear about, oh, the BI team, they're six months out. They can't take, and then people just stop.

as if they think they have to wait for the BI team to actually get to their priority request. And I'm like, well, what other levers do you have? Can you collaborate with one of your customers? Can you outsource to a consultant? have you looked at all the things that are in your control? But if you're in this very functional silo mindset, if you're not in an owner mindset, you're not thinking about all the levers you have at your disposal.

You mentioned the relational thing, and I just want to reference, you asked the book, one of my favorite books in our last talk, Product Management. In Managing Management Time, William Ankin, you know, talks about, he probably spends a half a chapter on this relationship between suppliers.

When you're an internal group, you have suppliers and internal customers and managing those like you would manage customer relationships. But that was key to detail page. So we looked and said, we have this many customers across the company. We can't meet all their requests. And we had this idea of how should we look at this? So we actually benchmarked ourselves to what if we were an AWS service? The amount of people that are putting code in and building on our stuff.

And that was helpful for us as a ruler to get the right ruler or organizing structure to give us some ideas of how would we change. Because we basically figured out. you know when we benchmarked ourselves we had more customers and more code changes than some of the aws services that were out there at least the new ones particularly and so we started that helped us identify

If we had manual interventions, if part of the process was somebody had to call me, that was a broken process. How do we get out of the way of our customers? The second thing we realized, and that was true down the road, not just like calling me, but we followed the principle. If you get more of what you subsidize, less of what you penalize. So how do we subsidize instead of having office hours?

which was subsidizing people coming to us to get approval or not approval. We said, we're done with office hours. Here are our policies for, and we revised a bunch of our policies for self-service. We also, you know, you have to support what you mandate. So when we mandated self-service. We very quickly prioritize on my team the missing tools or the missing policies or the missing pieces that would enable our customers to do self-service.

The next thing we did was we had gotten a lot of feedback that our decisions weren't transparent. And so rather than creating a big publishing arm to communicate out to all these people what our decisions were, because that's always going to be lagging. We published our decision criteria. We certainly published our monthly business updates, which gave a little bit of a roadmap, but we focused more on making sure our customers understood our decision criteria.

especially the contentious ones that were out of our hands. So we had a policy. You can't roll out a change. You can't put a change in our software that slows the page down because Jeff said, i remember this it was such a nightmare um because uh the rule was i mean they measured this page okay sorry we got to step back in a couple ways first i found a pain point on ethan yeah i know very quickly what was the art that you like so much again william onkin how do you

managing management time managing management time william onkin okay so here's what um when i first became aware of this the detail page took like 12 seconds to load it was huge it was very slow now the internet was slower but it took 12 seconds and i don't know when you got involved but they set out to cut it in half

and the thing is of course people abandon pages if you're waiting you punch out and that was lost sales so they cut it in half to six seconds and i don't you might know how much did sales go up every you know do you have It's a long time ago. So can we say anything about it?

And so I'm not going to get specific, but, you know, just think of your phone. Well, a couple of things. I got this baseball way to understand page speed is a hundred mile an hour fastball is roughly 300 milliseconds. It's a third of a second. 90 mile an hour fastball is 350 to 400 milliseconds. And Amazon page, the target was one second page load. And it started at 12.

And it started at 12. So on the P50 was one second, the P90 was two seconds. That's the target. And they're pretty close to those targets, by the way, but you're starting at 12. Right. And that was probably P90. But P90 means the 90th percentile because, of course, different people who are different distances from the server and blah, blah, blah, get different page loads. If you and I load the same page, we won't get it in the exact same time. So the 90th percentile, which is.

The last 10% of people were getting it in 12 seconds. Maybe the 50th percentile were getting it in five or six seconds or something. And by the way, this is why average is not useful. There's a lesson here Amazon has to share that they beat into us. We're giving away all the family jewels today on Amazon. The average experience doesn't because your average experience might be acceptable.

two, three seconds. But your last 10 or 15% of customers are getting this horrible experience of 12, 15, 18 seconds and they're abandoning. And that's 100% lost sales. Customers with the money, right? Part of the reason averages suck is we're not producing identical bread loaves here, right? We don't know. We're not trying to get everybody through the pipeline.

We want to get the people who are going to buy today, get them to the front of the line. Right. Yeah. So I cut in on you, but to finish this story. You're one team among thousands at least among hundreds who want to change this page and The idea is I want to make a change and if my change is going to inevitably add slowness the challenge i was given was go find somewhere to make speed and i'm like how the hell would i do this i have no idea i don't know any of these other teams it was just

I mean, in a way, I was being given an empowerment like, oh, well, you can fix this yourself. Go figure out how to make the page faster. But in a way, it's like, come on. I don't know what anybody else is doing to the page. That said, I want to say. Stefan, again, in terms of the family jewels, gave away the recipe for if you're a bottleneck team, you have to go to self-service.

The first idea is always, oh, we'll prioritize. And prioritizing is good. But prioritizing is meaningless when you're going to get to three things this month and you have a thousand requests. so then the second idea is always let's make the team bigger it'll do more and you see his face again the next thing is oh that's great we'll double the team it will get to six things of a thousand

So that doesn't work either. And so you have to break open the dam and say, you know what, you all do it yourself. But then we got to give you the tools and keep it safe. And so what Amazon has learned is. Self-service, self-service, self-service. And look, all of you are Amazon customers. And if you're not, shame on you. Get off my channel. Go buy something at Amazon and then come back here and you're welcome. No, only if you want to.

Only if it serves you. But all of your Amazon customers and if you've ever had to return something, which most of you have. it's all self-service you can click on the order you can click on what you want to return you can click on print the label you can pick a click on have it picked up like and that was all because

Just try and make it incredibly easy because we don't want to deal, you know, customer service calls. This is old data. This is way old. If you call customer service, it costs Amazon six bucks. This is old data. It's probably more now. If you email Amazon, it costs three bucks. Whatever we're selling doesn't have either a $6 or a $3.

profit margin unless i mean unless you're buying a whole computer or something you're buying like a book or a movie or something small it doesn't have three bucks of profit in it So basically you emailing or calling us is like eating all the profit from your order and from like five other orders. And so we want to quite naturally to prevent that. But yet we still were customer obsessed. We wanted you to get what you need, but never have to talk to us.

So this is why it's so amazing to me right now. And I noticed this a couple of weeks ago. The customer service function for Amazon is now top navigation on the retail site. I'm like, holy cow. How are they making it so easy to contact Amazon? It's because they've gotten so good. So good at making it self-service so we can afford it. Solve your own problem.

So as a bottleneck team, this self-service is important. Scale doesn't work. And I learned this in Marketplace. Sebastian Gunningham was the senior vice president of Marketplace. Most interesting man alive. Anybody whose bosses were Jeff Bezos. Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs is a pretty interesting guy. But, you know, he would regularly say, look, this third party marketplace is going to grow because sellers, hey, we're democratizing going and finding products that interest customers.

And there's a lot more sellers than there are Amazon. So let's focus on enabling them. So that marketplace mindset, that AWS mindset is what I brought with me to be the detail bottleneck team. detail page bottleneck team. How do I empower my customers to contribute to the system? So the second thing I did, Ethan, is I would say, hey, you've got a latency problem. We're not going to let you launch.

By the way, I kept a record or here is some, you know, we actually created trading credits. You know, we gave you a partner. You have a cap and trade system, huh? Or we gave you a component and we just said, if you can work on this component, we'll take care of latency optimization. We just traded effort. And we'd say, Ethan, you know, hey, can you help us with a couple improvements on this?

we'll take care of the latency optimization to eat this up. Like we turned latency into effort. And I just imported that on my team. But that was an enabling piece. The second thing we did was, you know, we created a portfolio balance of what should we work on. And we push my team to work on the biggest impact stuff to lead by example. Because if we just viewed our teams, the detail page team as...

We're building platform components and we're taking orders from all these dependency teams. We're always behind. And I push my team to say we're behind because people don't know what to copy. Nobody's setting an example of what would a great detail page, what is the optimal reference implementation of a detail page? What's a great web lab look like?

So we push the team of like, yes, 80% of our time is going to be on platform components, etc. But 20% of our time is going to be on showing by example what a great reference implementation is to give people something to follow. Right. Show them what to copy. And where possible, when I had a team come in, they're self-serving. The Softlines team comes in and says, we want to build a great apparel shopping experience.

And inevitably, they want to do something that there's no platform component for. Right. So I can either make them wait or we got good at partial investments on company critical things. So clothing was a stated priority for Amazon. consumables, groceries, specific priority. So I said, you know what? I'm going to give you three people to this. Again, I want to empower what I dictate. I want you to use the platform. I recognize there's a platform gap.

I want your architecture to be improving the ecosystem for everybody, but I don't want to slow you down. So I'm going to give you three people, four people as loaners from my team to help you architect and build the platform component. So that we make sure you build on your timeline, but we build what I want. This is good leadership, right? Make it win-win to do the right thing. And your team had to have enough resources to behave well.

to not be a roadblock because amazon teams any leader given a reasonable chance to and control their own destiny will bend over backwards to try and work with you so This is part of I want to talk a little bit more about good team structure and good leadership. Stefan has given one idea of. how a dependent team can serve its customers and give them pathways to success. You have to have a counterpart team.

that uh is willing to invest and chat says here contribution must be rewarded that's the trade-off right is i get something i want which is i get to launch without needing to understand latency across all these crazy variables and stefan and his team get something they want which is they get infrastructure built that they need that they don't have time and resources for and so it's a simple horse trade um not only is it a horse trade but if you go your own way

Right. And you build a nonstandard component. I will penalize you. So the other thing I put in place is you're welcome to go your own way. But I am no longer going to do the testing for you. I'm no longer going to do the deployments for you. You own it all the way, right? And so removing, kind of creating this like, so contribution doesn't have to be rewarded. Non-deviant behavior you don't want does need to be penalized.

right well this is economics right if you want more of something subsidize it if you want less of something tax it have some kids and you see how this works out too you know oh man yeah well You have a big brood. I'm hard-headed. It takes a lot to teach me. It's frustrating, but you have to empower your whole team to make this decision. Because inevitably, someone on a team comes to your new software engineer and says, can you just take care of this for me?

right just do it and so there's leadership but you you have to give your team the clarity to do that and that was the piece where on detail page we wanted to take the pressure off junior engineers Last thing we did, Ethan, and this was a little disruptive, we wanted people to complain about us. Welcome feedback. Well, welcome feedback, but we also thought inspection brought relief. So we knew we were under resourced and we knew we were confident that we had prioritized on good principle.

We were we were behind company winners. We're behind. And so we thought if someone complies, we thought escalation was great because we couldn't add more resources to our team. Right. And that was counterintuitive. It's like, well, just take care of them so they don't complain to the boss. And it's like, no, if you're on principle, like things are beyond your control. I couldn't go just hire more people. I'd hire it up to my headcount.

Right. So if you don't like latency, I think I've given you good options. Please go complain. Right. Because I'd love more people to help you. Or I'd love a policy change to help. But it was also an empowerment to our team as a team behavior that I find like I started to push on my team. If I have two people at the same level who disagree and they can articulate each other's position.

If I don't hear about it in 20 and they're at a standstill, if I don't hear about it in 24 hours, they're now in trouble because they're going to degrade relationships. Things are going to go sideways. Because they're probably facing a decision where there's either lack of clarity in role. They're disagreeing on who owns the final decision. I own the software, so I own the final decision.

Possession is nine tenths of the law. Possession is nine tenths of the law. You can't make me. If I own the engineers, in the end, what I decide will get coded. Or it's above their pay grade. Right. And so, you know, and they're stuck. And so we really pushed and that made everybody at first like.

I don't want to escalate. I don't want to be the tattletale. I don't, you know, but it's how do you get your empower your boss or the senior people on your team to help you? And viewing that escalation as a way to help was a good team structure. Does our team have good escalation practices? Is our team regularly escalating? This is another.

aspect of a good team to talk about for a minute if you're in a team where surfacing problems and discussing them in a positive way is penalized and like don't rock the boat you're in a bad team now you need to be aware of are you doing this politely and are you do like you need to first look at

Everyone, of course, believes that they're the nicest person and they're only putting forward rational arguments. But you should get some feedback on this because often you're an a-hole. Because I've been an a-hole much of my career, so I can say this with certainty.

i used to have a saying which is um people call me a loose cannon but that's only because they don't like it when i'm pointed at them and that was clearly just covering for being a jerk um so i had to learn and grow but if you're in a situation where we're bringing problems to the team and to the leader and saying look i see a problem here's what i would propose to solve it but i'm willing to pitch in on any solution

And they're like, why don't you shut up and get in your whole worm? It's time to come to one of our resume streams and polish up that resume and go somewhere else because other teams exist. Other teams exist at other companies that that.

actually want you to think and contribute the second thing stefan said earlier was about empowering his team so we were talking about what makes a good team look we talked about extreme ownership we've talked about that before You need owners on a team and you need everyone to feel like they have autonomy to do the right stuff and

If two people reasonably disagree, sometimes you make choices. There is more than one way to build things. There's more than one way to get systems to work. And so sometimes you just need to make a choice. Your proposal will work. My proposal will work. If I want Mexican for dinner tonight and you want Italian, it doesn't mean that Mexican is bad and Italian is good. It means we have to come to some accommodation.

Right. Our family dinner plans I'm sharing very broadly here is pizza tonight and curry tomorrow. And we that's true, by the way. And we like both of those. And there are ways, you know, but.

there's nothing wrong with pizza even though i like curry slightly well boy that's tough but i like them both um the point is when we talk about what makes a great team you need these components and you need a leader one of the things we haven't talked about yet is to let leaders evaluate the leader you're working for People leave jobs by the way 70% of the reason people leave a job is over their direct manager They don't always say that on the way out the door

But if you call them up two years later and say, hey, why did you leave Acme Inc.? Why did you quit? Why did you move on? Even at the time, if they said, well, my wife this or we were moving or compensation. Two years later, they'll say, I hated Fred. Fred drove me nuts. So be aware if you have a manager who's not leading well and you don't see them changing or listening.

and you can't have a conversation with them, yep, it's time to move. In the company, out of the company. Now, Edgy and some others in chat have said, well, can you always choose your team? It depends. In hard economic times, you may need a job, depending on your skill level and your industry.

uh my stream on thursday is going to be about career change it's going to be about designing your next career step with another amazon guest um and we're going to talk about how do you design where you're going next and how do you Plan and plot and get there. You may be stuck short term. If you have the wrong skills and it's a hard economy, you may be lucky to have the job you have and you may need to suck it up.

but that doesn't have to be the people who listen to this channel and i've said this before you you're educated you speak english because you're listening to someone who speaks english You have access to a computer. You have free time. You have all these assets. You can go anywhere if you want. And it's just a matter of time. You may need to suck it up for a year or even two years. But then you can be on this path to freedom.

i'm i'm gonna take a breath and let stefan riff on what i've said but if you if you need to make a move and on the other hand if you're on a team that lets you do this and you're under a good leader cling to that leader and thrive and that's where you apply the magic loop that i've talked about many other times so back to you ball to you i'm gonna i'm gonna take that that kind of riff on for a minute because i had

You know, privilege of working for a number of vice presidents at Amazon, all of which were quite different personalities. And I would, you know, people would ask career guidance, like, when should I leave a team? When's too soon? I'm like my gating function, my rate limiter is you're free to leave when you've made an appropriate contribution for your level.

And by the way, for a director of VP, your job is that's probably going to be two to three years because you need to set a strategy and put an organization in place. That's what you do. And that will take time. You're straight out of college. You might have made a contribution in 60 days, right? Congratulations. You've punched your ticket to be able to go somewhere else. But I would, I picked my leader.

And I was more concerned about my leader than I was about the specific functional area within Amazon. Well, there's things I wanted to learn. You know, I wonder, who am I going to learn from? And the nature of the organization will take on the nature of the leader, what they what they permit or what they don't. Now, a couple of times I was moved under a leader. And so this leaders.

Very professional, was a good leader. Well, sorry, they were very accomplished. They got a lot done. But their manner and personality style. just made me cringe every day and it's not because they were a bad human they're just a very different person than i do than i am and the first time i worked for them

It was really frustrating. But I came back around because there was an interesting opportunity and I could work for and I worked for this person a second time because I had learned how to create the use the best of this person. to help me and how i could actually help them um but i also knew there were some i put some guardrails i was very upfront about it i'm like if this starts happening i'm out

But I was able to come in the second time. So I recognized it was not actually competence or capability. It was personality. They weren't a bad manager. It was style. And their style was very different than mine. And there's other things I could poke on. I mean, they had their weaknesses in their confidence. We all do, right? You're not going to find a perfect boss. If you're looking for a boss who's perfect all the time, forget it.

yeah you're like that's what you're not gonna find so i did want to put that in that one person or team it's not necessarily you have a bad boss you're also free to leave if you've you've made your contribution and i would extend that across the team like good teams um

You know, I love the movie Draft Day. Just, you know, that general manager perspective of how he's kind of intersecting the team. You get, you know, what do you need, right? And that personalities, capabilities beyond job description. And the opportunity to grow and learn within a team is the team pulling together. So I've been having a lot of conversations with hiring managers as well. And they're like, oh, we need to add this. We need to add this to our team.

And I'm like, let's break that down. Do you need more capacity on your team? Do you need particular skills on your team? Or do you really need a person on your team, right? You don't need to hire, you need to get more work done. Or you need to get a new kind of work done. So let's look at all the levers to do that in your team. Maybe we should you just found a great person, but you're not hiring them because they don't have exact role fit. Well, would they make your team better?

I did have one point Amazon just because it's a funny story I'll share for the channel. I had a manager come to me and be like, I've got this new engineer. He's joining your team in two weeks. You need to get somebody off your team so you have a head count to put them on.

And this is really very different. And I came back and was like, look, here's your job description. It says make your team better. That's your job. I'm giving you American baseball moment. I'm giving you and tell us how old it is. I'm giving you a rod. You need to take one of your little leaguers and say, hey, there's lots of jobs at Amazon. Let me help you find one because you're bringing A-Rod to your team. But what he was poking me on.

was and also he was helping me set up the team with the right composition we were starting we knew we were coming into going to be a really hard cs problem and he knew we were going to need someone with the confidence and thought leadership And it actually turned out to be a great thing for the other people on the team because they then had a mentor and a kind of tutor to learn from. So he was pushing me and the edges of it may sound mean and kind of make a fun story.

By the way, another person went on and did great things in a different team. So it works out. It's a convenience of Amazon. But thinking about the composition of the team, and sharing work and growing i think ethan i'm just kind of riffing on that for a minute was something that i thought about as we were hiring don't get stuck into we need someone just like that other person or we need to fill this one person role Most of the teams are executing as a team. And so...

You know, when I look at well-functioning teams, you know, I look at some of those intersections and do people pick up the in-between tasks, right? Not everybody's going to be at the same level, you know, when it comes to a team. and what's expected on the team. I was talking on a different channel.

I tried to train my team on inputs. So it was also job descriptions. And I don't know if you remember this. You know, an L7 is expected, an L6 is expected to be able to write for a VP at Amazon, a level six person, which is a... is two levels up. That's the standard product manager is an L6 and they're supposed to be able to write three levels up, right? 7, 8, 10 to a VP. And then an L7 senior product manager. So the next level up is supposed to also be able to do three levels up.

And I had my assistant was working with me on my calendar time. And she's like, well, do you want to review this paper? Because, you know, she was doing a great job helping me make sure we we inspected before we went to a senior vice president. and i'm like no and she's like uh are you sure and she was uncomfortable on my behalf and she hadn't worked with me that long and she's like you know you've had four or five papers and you've only you've only reviewed one of them

And so I went back. I'm like, look, your manager should be training you to be able to do your job. I've worked with these guys and men and women on the outline, on the opening paragraph. And I've tested them previously. I know they can take it the last mile. Now if this other person was writing the paper, I'll work with them a little more closely because they don't have as much experience.

But I got the feedback that was, you know, unusual, but your manager on a good team should be giving you, I think should be giving you capabilities. not just helping you solve the problem of the day. A good manager should be teaching at all times. I've talked to a number of leaders and I'll run this by you. At the end of your career, how much of your job was teaching?

Oh, 80, 90%. Right. It was either teaching or it was, I would call it statesmanship. I was, you know, working with other leaders at similar level, sometimes teaching on different things or just, are we winning? helping each other win. Okay. Yeah, I agree. the the mentoring teaching showing by example that that's the full-time job of a higher level leader in particular so if you don't see your leaders around you teaching that's another sign to get out of dodge if you do it's a sign to stay in

dodge as long as you can because good leaders are rare I'll match your leadership story with a funny one of my own it comes from a friend of mine uh that i hired he's still at amazon i hired him all 13 14 years ago so he's had a long run but he was telling a story that um look the fact is Amazon hires a lot of people who've gone to very good colleges. To get into those colleges, they generally have money or opportunity. They come in.

They're doing well. They're going to a top tier school. So they're going to an MIT, a Waterloo in Canada, somewhere great. And then they're coming to Amazon. So their life is on rails, right? They're coming from a family that could provide them. uh you know lived in a good neighborhood and had great education then they went to a great college then they're coming to a great company they do sometimes come with a lot of entitlement he recruited in a couple people

or got in a couple people from, I don't know what the program's called, Stefan, you may know, but Amazon has a program now that cross trains people from other professions into software development. And he hired in a couple of the first people from this. which were single moms coming from non-professional work in their 30s or 40s into software. Okay, so Rico has added it. It's Amazon Tech Academy. So this is like a cross-training program to be engineers.

And it turns these people who have other skills and are often far into their careers into SDE ones, which is the same as our college graduates. And the funny thing about it is these people were gold in the team because from a team dynamics viewpoint. you had some people who were like, well, Amazon doesn't provide very good snacks and there's no onsite massages. And these people who had been in other roles, whatever it was, maybe selling real estate or.

what childbirth yeah or childbirth or whatever we're like okay son i have a boy almost your age and we're gonna have a little bit of come to jesus moment here about Maybe you ought to just realize how hard the world is. It was just great because it wasn't coming from the boss then. It was someone else saying, you know. I can't speak for you, but I am freaking glad to have this job because it beats so much. I was a nurse's assistant changing bedpans. I was...

working, you know, the front desk at a hotel to get by. And now I'm sitting in a nice corporate office with air conditioning, building something people will really use, surrounded by great colleagues. Get a fucking grip. and the boss can't say that right like the boss can't say that but coming from a peer so that's that's what i mean even as a boss like i would

Yeah, we talked about this a little bit last time, you know, having a book list is one thing, but can I create a team that creates learning within each other? And can I build that mix of team? When I looked at teams, I would try to. you know i would look at my teams and i would try to get at least one of my so i had managers of managers as well as team but i looked for a mix both in my manager my teams of amazon amazon expertise i wanted some tenure i wanted some old fart

You know, people have been around for a while. I wanted some brand new, right? Because even if they've been around for a while, like want to keep reminding people to audit what they think they know is true. Right. And so new people kind of test that, you know, I wanted different walks of life. And so, you know, maybe that's me. You know, I come a little bit nontraditional, not a ton, but a little bit.

And those I found the teams, like how could they do? So if you have a book list as a team you're reading, that's just one way to be a learning team. Right. Hey, we're going to have a lunch this month. We all picked a book. OK, but everybody come with one idea they thought was great and idea they'd like to try. And oh, by the way, can you lead this book group? And I delegate that. I delegated my staff meeting. Right. um you know i'm gonna test this person to lead among their peers

But you can create that. Obviously, I was just a manager. Yeah, I love that. I love the grit and mom story because bringing those different perspectives, it's like, hey, we're going to make the team better. I'll run this by you, right? Let's be honest. Would you rather have someone on your team who's slightly more brilliant but thornier or someone who's slightly less brilliant but super eager to help and to bring the team up?

Yeah, I take character and attitude every day. Yeah. Every day and twice on Sunday. So in my product management, I may have mentioned last time, right? A third of the product management team did not have an MBA. Right. They had gained those skills somewhere else. And they outperformed on some other dimension. They knew how to execute or they were way deep in analytics. But they had earned their stripes doing something else. And so even when I'm resume screening for the team.

I'm looking at, is this person a learner? Does this person show? So my resume screen for the channel for fun, even though it's a different thing, I would look for demonstrated success in multiple, in different. uh industries or disciplines because that gave me a signal of were they a first principles person uh did they understand first principles second thing i'd look for is did they have different size of organizations had they been in a startup and a big company

or something small and big, small business even better. Because again, I'm looking for that sense of, do they know how to pick up the track, take out the trash? And do they also know how to communicate with multiple businesses? And then I would look for other symbols of grit. You know, they're from the Midwest and they deal with a foot of snow before they go to school or, you know, and that's just what I tested for.

Right. Competence is what I'm looking for, but character is going to be part of the team. I mentioned draft day, but Michael Ruzzioni was critical to the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. Why? He had a lot of brothers and cousins. He wasn't the top skilled player. Somehow he became the captain, right? He didn't score that much, but he scored the winning goal, right? He knew how to drive people.

and make good relationships and he was competent enough right he wasn't incompetent to be on the team but it makes a difference so good teams know how to value all the different pieces not just getting the job done The thing I wanted to poke on a little bit, Ethan, is we were at Amazon with single threaded leaders. Yes. And there's other ways of organizing a team, two in a box, and I'm not as familiar with that.

Do you pretty much always recommend single threaded leaders? You know, or how do you think about that as you've looked at things at Twitch or, you know, other different places? Is that really just Amazon's? It's the only way to go, but they can do it. Okay, so let's define it first for people who may not know because most people here are on Amazon. So single-threaded leader means this. It means a leader only works on one project.

If you've read the book Extreme Ownership, it's not an Amazon-only idea. Extreme Ownership is the two Navy SEALs, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, who talk about SEAL leadership. And the idea, though, is work on your highest priority. You should know what your main problem is. And at Amazon, the idea was the quote that really is telling is the best way to fail at inventing something is to make it someone's part time job.

And so what we found at Amazon was if you gave someone several jobs, often they would focus on whichever one of those. had the loudest people yelling about it or had the quickest, easiest results, and they would naturally deprioritize something. And they weren't wrong to do this. The problem was...

Where it breaks down is, I'll give a simple example. Amazon started as a bookstore. It grew big, somewhat big, selling books. Then they want to start selling CDs. Well, if you make selling CDs part of the book guy's job. He has a devil's choice. I can make a change in how we sell books and that will make an extra million dollars today.

or I can make a change to support how we're going to sell music, and that will make maybe a million dollars tomorrow. What we learned is you need to have someone worried about making books better. who's moving as fast as he can to pick up the million dollar book opportunities and have someone else who's all about how we're going to build a big music business someday. So that's... and amazon's answer to this was to have single threaded leaders now is single threaded always right well first

The idea of Single Threaded, by the way, was that these people would have all the resources they needed to pursue their business. But this was never quite completely true. Because... the warehouse was the same so you didn't have two separate warehouses you didn't have a book warehouse and a music warehouse and this annoying detail page guys those annoying detail page guys you had to display it on the same pages because you didn't want

a music page to look completely and come totally different than a book page because it would confuse the hell out of customers and on and on and on so the first thing they realize is amazon talks about this single threaded idea It is good to have a leader focused on a project and a team focused on a project. But you have to decide what's in the single thread, which is a computer science term, the single focus and what's not.

And the second thing you have to decide that I ran into more is how do those single threaded leaders grow? Who manages them? Because you can be obsessive about it. And like, oh, well, everybody's supposed to be single threaded. Well, what do you do when somebody's assignment, they're bigger than that single assignment?

On the one hand, they're doing good work. On the other hand, they're ready to grow. You lose them. And so where I've wrestled with it most, and you asked the question, I'm just going to reflect back to you. Where I wrestled with it most... was with leaders who wanted to grow and who were ambitious and i they were killing it but they seemed like they could do more so i don't know what do you think um well i think there's

The challenge that I've been finding with the idea of single-threaded leadership has been one about size and scale. So with some of the smaller businesses that I've been working with, or even in my own... you know the startup as we're starting to look at think about our hires etc um you know the the old adage of hey you're going to have 100 things that you need that you're told to do five of them need to get done you're only going to have time for three

That's the secret to success at Amazon, figure out how to handle that. That's where I run into a challenge of a single threaded leader doesn't work. In the smaller organizations, it's because, hey. You know, there's only 10 people in the tech team. They have five products. It's really only two people per product.

And they probably do need to have five. We'll ignore the constraints in revisiting them. Let's just assume they're all valid for a minute. So a single-threaded leader, all of a sudden you have five teams of two.

and one person like it it starts to break down at that size they don't have all the resources and then the second you know piece on it so size is one resource is another um and then you know as as i've thought about what i love about it and what did work is again i always work with my team about scale i'm like if you're doing the same job so with leaders that want to grow i'm like if you're doing the same job again next year or the next time the cycle comes around you failed

Because you didn't scale. The business grew 20%. You should be training someone behind you so that you can take on more. Now, whether I always had more to give, that was a different problem and where I ran into trouble. And that was okay. Sometimes we just export it. Like I encourage people to do two things just to tie this back to the team for a minute. And I'll come back to Singapore later. One is I personally looked around once a year.

And if I saw something that was attractive to me outside my team, I tried to change my role or talk to my boss about whether I could add it in. So one year, I saw data science everywhere. I said, I want to start learning about data science. And I went to my VP. He's like, you need a data science team.

Let's give you one. Right. And I encourage my people to do the same because, again, on the leadership front, I'm like, look, I want to help you meet your career goals, hopefully on this team. Well, let's plan it together. And so I think that single threaded leader piece, while I like it in theory, and I do think it can work more places because it forces a prioritization.

I struggle with the how do you keep pushing innovation with someone who you can't split off the devil's choice. They've got to do both. They've got to operate today at scale and they have to solve their own innovators dilemma. Yeah. And so where look where it was good. It worked 100 percent of the time where.

where a priority objective was not getting attention and you just needed to carve off people who didn't have to worry about the big pnl today to work on the future pnl that worked and Look, Jeff made a choice at Amazon, which is he was willing to accept inefficiency to have faster speed.

So part of what people always argue is, oh, having all these single teams and all these separate resources is very, very expensive. Jeff's theory, which has worked in Amazon, is to go faster is worth being redundant. Go ahead. two is greater than zero two is great yeah so this is one of his great equations uh jeff had an argument with a guy who was trying to say you have so much redundancy and after arguing and arguing the guy finally wrote

or kept saying, well, why are you allowed this? And Jeff finally said two is greater than zero, which is he'd rather fund two teams and get two products than try and make them coordinate and be efficient and end up with zero. and so that philosophy is work now all of you have heard this in different ways fail fast fail forward speed matters speed is life there's lots of ways to say it

Amazon has proven to some degree that trying to move faster at the cost of efficiency can work as a strategy. And that's the two is greater than zero. The thing I wanted to say here to the point of growth and people should grow in their jobs. I threatened in chat. You can't see it, Stefan. I threatened in chat. I'm going to.

challenge software engineers i had software engineers come to me all the time and say my work is boring it's repetitive it's not challenging i keep having to make these changes in code And it's beneath me. I don't like this, blah, blah, blah. And being a good boss who was evil and had lots of time to think, I said, okay, I have a challenge for you. If it's so effing easy, then you should be able to automate it.

build a tool make it self-service and um if you're now gonna if you're just about to tell me well that's really hard blah blah then it's not that easy so i kind of have you screwed here the thing it's either you can automate it like i'm gonna give you all bad choices either it's not that easy and you're whining or it is that easy and you can automate it in which case i'll let you do something else please or

you're not good enough to automate it. So you go ahead and let me know like which one of those and I'll work for you there. So that's my evil pointy haired boss Dilbert boss for the moment and that worked pretty well. We had someone who worked for both of us, and if he was with us right now, he'd tell that story. He came to me and said, I've just got too much on my plate. I'm like, fantastic. I'm giving you more. Here you go.

And, you know, we went through the piece of where it was. I'm like, I don't think you're good at prioritizing. And I don't think you're sufficiently delegating. And I think, you know, I'm like, you know, the software engineering maxim of laziness and patience and hubris.

I think you need to practice that a little more. The answer to people having trouble prioritizing is not taking stuff off their plate. It's often adding more. Overload them until they crack. Until they have to innovate. Until they have to become efficient. Yeah. And so as a team, you know, one of the things I've been trying is I've been trying to explain a team structure where we can't quite afford a single threaded leader. I'm like, you guys should should try a Quidditch approach.

And I'm like, you got to try to get the game done with, you know, a little bit less than player and you need to send somebody off chasing the snitch. And so I'll ask the team, like, who's chasing the snitch on your team? You guys talk about you want to start doing more AI on your team and you're not doing any. Who are you sending off to experiment with that? Go chase the snitch and find the efficiencies to do that.

But I'm still trying to figure out more effective ways, haven't solved it, just trying stuff. When I don't have the resources with a client to apply a single-threaded leader, how do I get them a first step of the way? Or when I've got a small team, how do I help them still break up that innovator's dilemma to get faster progress and focus?

So how do you feel about people have been asking if we're going to take questions? How do you feel about seeing what's what's tops on the question list? Sounds great. I love questions. Good. Well, I'm going to see what pops up here. I'm going to play window management just a second. I have a seven-year-old with special needs. I get questions all day. And they're interesting. They're super fun.

Someone who works for me, his daughter has downs. Yeah. Oh, is that same for you? Yeah. You do get questions all day then. Totally get it. So we don't have too many questions in here. So... if folks if you want to put them in or if you want to vote on anything we'll take a couple but i usually my rule is if it doesn't have more than one vote in our question tool and there's 120 of you watching if only one person wants to talk about it you know we're not going to talk about it um

But the first question is, how does one highlight character and attitude on a resume? So, Stefan, you mentioned this trait. Now you go. How do you do that? You know, when I see there's things I might see on a resume. Right. And you mentioned earlier, like some, you know, hey, Harvard offers a great education and not everybody has the opportunity to get there. But Harvard does some screening.

So, you know, sometimes they may also pick up some people who've had a lot of opportunity and they have entitlement perspective. The military, the United States military, other military, it's hard. It's a lot of pushups. And you have to learn some humility. So chances are, if I see military experience on someone's resume, that they've done some hard things. Now, on a resume, it's just a signal.

It may be noise. It may not. It's not proof of anything, any more than a Harvard MBA, maybe someone who's awesome. It may not be a good fit to Amazon or to the role I'm hiring for. So, you know, military can be things that you've done that are hard or maybe unique or repetitive. You know, travel, not all travel is easy. And so I'm not sure if my resume would scream grit.

But if you've lived in a certain place, so I went to school in Michigan in the snow and walked uphill a mile each way. So when I see different parts of the country, I have some parts of the world. I may be able to check that. So I will say something now. I've had a lot of my new dark rye that I've never said before. And it's super controversial. And I couldn't say if I work for Amazon.

And I want to circumspect this very, very carefully. And I was younger when I said this, but I think I still live by it. So I once asked the question, if I was only allowed... to know one thing about a candidate one thing and that thing you're you're wondering what is that one thing i'll let you answer that the one thing in my case was where is the candidate from

they are an engineer because that's what i do and they're either from america they're an american-born american educated engineer or they are an indian-born indian educated engineer and this is the only thing I'm allowed to know, who would I hire? And now that I don't have to, you know, Amazon would be sued for this. Any company would be sued for it.

and luckily see i was never forced to make this choice but i would hire the indian-born engineer blind if i was fourth because they got to america Through a generally much harder road and my experience was look Americans don't want to don't want to become engineers they want to become lawyers doctors wall street bankers something else um

And of course, it depends on an individual basis. Individuals are different. And by the way, I am a fucking American born engineer. So it's not that I don't like myself. It's simply that I saw people with more grit and challenge climbing up from harder circumstances. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't have it that hard, but, you know, I was the first in my family to go to college. I paid my own way.

I walked in snow. You know, it still wasn't that hard. It wasn't that hard to pay my own way in the United States. You know, and so that that ability, like, are they going to work? Like, where's the work? piece of it so you know back to the question too i i look also for other interests right um and other interests can be assembled yeah yeah other interests hunger

Did someone overcome adversity? Yeah. The roles you took in organizations or the actually, are you, you know, so there's an interesting, I don't know if you've ever read the captain's class as a book. You know, he, he. It's a really fun book, by the way. He does an analysis of what are the best sports team of all times. In the first chapter, very Amazon style, he throws... Which book is this? Sorry. It's called The Captain's Class. The Captain's Class. Okay.

And the first chapter, even the introduction, he kind of adjusts and defends why he throws out all the other studies. Some of them are. rankings of best sports teams. Some of them are regional specific, they're gender biased, they're age biased. And so then what he's trying to do is he's saying, what are the attributes that have made the best sports team of all time? And obviously the giveaways in the title.

So, you know, he dispels some myths. It's about the coach. It's about the money. But one of the things he articulates in there is the captains of these most dominant sports teams of all time. Most of them were not the all-star. Michael Jordan's teams don't make it. They were good, but they weren't necessarily a superstar. Second is they didn't usually lead the team in the marquee KPI. They were usually serving in some part.

Bill Russell led in assists a lot more than he led in points. He led in assists and rebounds more often than he led in points, but his Celtics were one of the dominant teams. And then this grit. capability comes through of they are you know they are working and driven um and so it's interesting to see in these like in a team in a well-performing team

you know, it's going to be elevated by someone, even if it's just one, like that single mom who, you know, earned her way into the future tech program. Yeah, absolutely. One or two people can set a team's culture, positively and negatively. People in chat are talking about moving to the West Coast, for example. um and i you know i made the move to the west coast as well and it turned out to be great for me also and um

Throughout history, people have migrated for opportunity. This is a sidebar, okay, since I'm on all kinds of rants today. Sidebar on our immigration policy. America has been insane my entire life.

to limit the number of people. This is the dumbest equation on earth. Let's let some other country or culture pay to college educate someone who then wants to move here and we say no. all the investment in this person is done and now the expense has been paid and we're going to turn their ass down uh this is not the solution now i understand americans need jobs and there are problems in america

So I'm not stupid about that either, but there is a better way to solve this than refusing to take the incredibly valuable young asset that some other country has constructed and put it to work in our country. And by the way, that person is probably going to go back to the other country and create jobs. Sure. Also true. And God bless them. I want them to or send money home. But they can also create those jobs here. Right. Chances are they're a job creator, not a job.

look i can't solve all political problems if we need to tax some people or whatever so that americans also get education and have jobs and whatever fine but to turn down the chance to to skim the cream of the crop from every other country on earth uh like no and and look that's just xenophobia It's literally just...

It's nuts. Those symbols to the question, because I could rant with you for a while on that, believe you me. The symbols of the question, I'm just looking for early things that I can then, I'm going to keep testing, like as we discussed in the interview. process etc he's back answering the actual question good man keep going but well i mean and so i would you know i would joke and i'd even say today was like i hire midwestern canadians because i know they're going to get to work in snow

Right. Or I'm going to also hire some people from other countries. I'm with you on the India engineer because they're also going to get here in snow unless I tell them just please stay home. Dial into VPN because they know it's work. Right. You know, I've been asked to do it. It's a privilege. And I'm going to come meet that privilege to come to work. Yeah. So if we can open up that privilege to more people, I'm with you on the question.

Somebody in chat, one of our longtime regulars, is saying, sounds rather prejudiced, Ethan. Don't you want to allow other nations to profit from their work? I assume you're joking, but if you're not, if you're dead serious, hey. they should retain, you know, that's a separate question. That's about them keeping their people. The thing I addressed is our policy of us keeping them out. Right. And that's foolish.

If someone has decided they want to move here, and they're, look, Canada does this right, by the way. Canada, I believe, so it's probably some Canadians. Well, Edgy might know others. There's some other Canadians here. Basically, as I understand it. If you have a college degree from a real college accredited by some standard, I don't know what the standard is. If you have an accredited college degree, you can immigrate to Canada.

That's what I understand. Now, someone may correct me, but I believe Canada has figured this out, which is basically someone else paid for your college education will take you. And and that is a pretty like. That should basically be our national policy, in my opinion.

So we'll move on. There's another question people really are burning here. So mods, go ahead and roll us the next question. It says I'm an SDM at Amazon and I'm transferring orgs in March, building a new team to find roadmap under my mentor. What are the most important tenets or principles I should consider in this new role? Stefan, you're the guest. Have at it. Oh, man. Well, first off, they already referenced some things of, you know, tenants and tenants are a pretty Amazon thing.

You know, for those of you who may not know, if you haven't ever talked about tenants, Ethan, or just to refresh, right? These are the decision principles, right? What are the decision principles that our team is going to use? So if someone's faced with a decision on my team and I'm not there. They can explain their decision based on these tenants when we get there. So what I would start with is within the Amazon ecosystem, they will support you. You're going to start a new team.

make sure you're clear on what your team's charter is and you know, how do you, and so that's one. And as you get clarity with, you know, because of data, set some initial. milestone goals to track with your mentor, with your boss. How is this team going to be productive? And in the spirit of fail fast. Most teams don't get the privilege of a year before they're productive or 18 months before they're productive. How are you going to actually deliver to your customers?

What's your team's charter or purpose? Part of that is what do you produce for customers and who is your customer? And then make sure your boss or your mentor is aligned on that. And then how are you going to test that in the first 90 days? how can we prove it incremental steps how can we show it can we agree on what success looks like

That's a tenant thing in part, but are we agreed on what success looks like? Are we agreed on the timeline? And how can I measure it? How will I know if I'm on track or off track? I read a book long ago written by a Microsoft guy. The joke in it is how does a software project become a year late? And the answer is one day at a time. You never slip a year in reality. You lose a day here, a day there.

You know, that that was Steve McConnell and rapid development. I was debating whether it was Steve McConnell or Joel on software. I was like, either one of them, though. Right. By the way, if you're in the software world. Steve McConnell, I don't know if he's as active writing anymore, but Joel on software is like fun, snarky, edgy. I find it like crack. Yeah, he's one of those guys. I also...

Stefan, do you read Seth Godin at all? Yeah. I was recommending Seth Godin's blog. There are some people, look, I am so glad you all come here to listen to me and Stefan. Seth Godin is smarter than both of us. Hands down. You know, you should read. He puts out like a couple paragraphs every day and at least half of days. I'm like, shit, this guy is so he's just really good at what he does.

um but you don't get an hour of him interactive so you know it's it's all that all right we got a couple of other questions here um there's a question just for me we'll pop it up real quick oh Well, I don't have anything to add to what Stefan said here, right? Focus on quick results. Amazon cares about bias for action. So the next question is...

This one's for me. Love your podcast and stream. I learned a ton from it. Would you consider doing a show on how to grow and develop your team? We've done some of that. It's awesome you had a team of over 600 folks. Yeah, I think my biggest team was closer to 800.

oh boy there's so much there um i think my number one thing is uh hire your tier of leaders very carefully in other words you can't do everything so if you're going to manage a really big org we've talked all about how leaders are so important um hire your leaders very carefully um It's like coaching staff, you know, running detail page, I had made the commitment to get closer to customers and understand shopping behavior in every country.

You know, we've said I had a bunch of kids. I was not going to get on a plane and go to every country, but I made a commitment to go to every country. And my leaders represented me. right we divided up the countries we went out but we wanted to make sure it was it looked like one clear team you know we were the same people we brought it all back nobody i didn't want anybody to feel short-changed

If I was in their country, well, I was actually, if they felt shortchanged because I was there versus one of my people, that was okay. Fantastic. Right? Fantastic. Oh, man, we wanted, you know, we wanted Russ. Okay, great. But I didn't want it the other way.

and and so i can't i'm right there with you pick those pick those senior leaders that core team um thoughtfully okay very good uh and so i'd of course consider doing a show on this um in our discord there's a show suggestions channel you can drop it in there uh happy to have you do that so we'll run a few more questions stefan spent a lot of time with us we'll wind this up in not too long

how did you balance next question is how did you both balance building something well versus building something quickly so i have my opinion there but it's fun building well versus building quickly Um, A lot of my lessons come from outside of software and Amazon. I'm a woodworker. I have animals, chickens and bees. And so understand what are the decisions that you're going to live with for a long time.

long time wait a minute sorry i can't help this you have seven kids and you raise birds and bees uh yeah just fact checking yeah well it actually fits together because if you get kids and they want a pet You know, chickens, they can't over love them. They can't if they forget to feed them. It's OK. Chickens will scratch out a living. It's good. And it's not a long commitment. You know, if the chickens got to go into the soup, you're good. So it was really practical from having kids.

But you learn about pecking order. It's a real thing. And you learn about a few other things. You don't love the bees too much either. Well, what you do learn in bees is because bees have a life cycle of 47 days, give or take. If your hive has bad behavior, kill the queen. And put a new queen in, and 47 days later, you're going to have different behavior. Yeah, so sometimes you do need to change the leader on your team if you want some different behavior down the road.

But, you know, kind of in that, you know, I forgot. Well versus quickly, right? Because there's always pressure for speed. There's always pressure for quality.

yeah you know understand the decisions that oh i also you know we've done eight renovations as a house and so changing your pipes is a lot different than changing your faucets i can change faucets down the road pretty quickly um you know going with floors you can change floors right but you know under so understanding what you're what you're gonna have to live with for a long time um in in the well part

And then also understand that everything is a step to somewhere. So do you know where the step to somewhere is? So you don't get the privilege of waiting for two years to build the perfect infrastructure. You need to have a portfolio. What's going to deliver quickly? And what do you need to build that scales? I don't know how to articulate it differently, but that's how I think about it. Yeah, better versus well. One of my bosses, this guy, Bill Carr.

um who wrote the book we were talking about working backwards he said look so much software has been shipped and not made any difference and so much else doesn't get shipped at all um essentially i took an approach often of get it out see if it works then pay the cost of fixing it because so much of it didn't work you could just kill it instead

and or it just wouldn't see the light of day and so this doesn't work everywhere and by the way someone uh someone else was talking about look speed and software is different than speed and other jobs we have we have uh a gentleman on our channel ed uh he's a fun guy he works in construction he comes here and he drinks apparently heavily while he watches sometimes uh and uh

But his point is, in construction, if you speed too much, people die. If you cut too many corners, you're too much of a hurry. Things go very badly wrong. Software, if it's not cardiac support software baked into some hospital equipment, doesn't work that way. And you can experiment and roll back. Stefan and I both come from a world. He's talked about this stuff called Web Labs. Web Lab is internal Amazon language for an A-B testing.

framework where you can actually have two solutions working at the same time and you show solution a to some customers and b to others and you can turn things on and off very quickly well in that case having lots of tests out there trumps building super carefully because if the test blows up you never want it to blow up but if it starts to blow up you just turn it off and go back to the thing that was working until you fix it and so

low to almost zero cost experimentation speed trumps careful planning because if it starts to work you can then squint at it and say is it built well now I've told this story before, though, about building insufficiently well. And I won't go through the whole story before. I have gotten burnt. I lean towards speed over quality. I've gotten burnt.

By building too low a quality. And having that bite me. So there is a balance. But in general. In general particularly at Amazon. But in general in the software world. Faster. works better because once you know it works you have a signal and you can patch and rebuild now

Stefan was also right. You have to choose between what is decoration. Button color can be changed very easily. Fundamental database architecture or information architecture is hard to change. As you have to understand which things are. you know to go to ed's world which things am i pouring in concrete and which things am i building out of wood because poured concrete is really expensive to change and cutting an inch off a two by four is not as hard or even replacing a two by four so

um all right we'll take a couple more questions someone wanted to know did anyone actually automate their job um because i made this challenge automate your way out of your job uh the best example i know of this is because I worked most of my time at Amazon as a leader. was both I and someone else at Amazon that I know got to the point where they had grown one of their leaders under them into bigger and bigger jobs. And the only job they had left to give them was their own.

And so I offered one of my leaders my job and said the right thing to do with this leader is give him my job and I'll go find something else to do. And I know of somebody else who did that. Stefan, did you know a guy, Kurt Ort? Oh, yes. I worked for Kurt for a while. So Kurt says he did this. I don't remember who the other leader was, but he got to a point where he had grown somebody. I think the guy's name was Jim. I don't know anymore. But he had grown this guy and grown this guy.

And finally he's like, I don't have anything else for him to do. The right thing to do is give him my job. He's fully qualified and I will go do something else. So I would consider that automating your way out of a job in a way. Did I ever have software engineers who did it? The short answer is I can't name one who completely automated their job, but certainly there were people who automated parts of their job.

and i'll smile about this okay i'll tell you a story of software engineers cheating so earlier in this um somebody who's still in chat was complaining and saying uh was observing i don't know if he's complaining he was saying look prime video is not as good as netflix well my team early on very early on over a decade ago we had

products that would go in and out of windows so we had copies of movies that were no longer part of the service but we still had them on our server well my team hacked a back door so they could watch the stuff that wasn't public anymore which i'm sure by the way

studios hearing that would be like what you bastards that's completely wrong but my team wanted to watch the movies internally and they knew we had copies of them well honestly like my team was willing to put in the effort and they wanted to watch movies while they worked

Peace Like it was not worth me getting uptight being like you guys shouldn't be watching that they were busting their ass I had a guy. He was my best engineer I'll admit this was super hard for me he produced the most code while having three windows open a window coding a window chatting with his friends and a window streaming a movie now i am i am a one thing at a time person

and watching him do this all i wanted to do was yell at him and say close the chat window in the movie but he was my most productive engineer so i let him do it his way right so uh you know and it worked for him and he did the most uh work by far so i don't know stefan anything you want to add to that about have you ever seen anyone automate their job you know free themselves up yeah

Well, to tie it way back to the beginning, if you know what your job is and what your contribution deliverable is, you're going to think about, is there a cheaper way to get it done? I can't prove that anybody did this, but I do think I had a couple people on my team that outsourced part of their own job.

uh because between fiverr or whatever they you know could get this little thing done and i'm like hmm you know i can't prove it But, you know, so I think if you're thinking about what is the job to do, and I've had similar to Ethan, like I've said to my insurers, like, look, if you can get the job done in 20 hours instead of 40, way to go.

Right. I had worked consulting. And so I always thought about bill rate. Right. If I'm working more than a 45, 50 hour week, I've just diluted my own salary. Right. And so I either didn't scope the job right when I set up the goal. Right. Or, you know, my boss let me get out of, you know, somebody did the job in 20 hours. Way to go. They found something faster and they innovated.

Let's talk about, I'll share, dangerous leadership decisions because it seems like you made one. Did I understand you correctly that someone working at Amazon outsourced part of their work to Fiverr? I don't think it was Fiverr. Whatever. To someone not an Amazon employee. Yes. Yeah. So Amazon officially would not like that. No. No. Okay. I'm going to share that. I did the same.

I had an L7, a senior manager on my team. At Amazon, you can't have an assistant until you're a director in LA. And he was being driven crazy by meetings and whatever. He went and hired a woman to be his assistant and gave her his network token. And she was logging in as him and managing his meetings behind the scenes and his travel.

This is a complete breach of Amazon security. No question. And this is many years ago. And I told him, I said, look, I wish you hadn't told me this. I'm going to deny it. If I ever hear, you know, if it ever comes up, I never knew shit. But if it's making you more efficient, you live your life. Like, understand you'll be fired for this if it comes up. But.

life hack yeah you live your life and so interestingly this is where the leadership rubber hits the road for people right like i could have come down on my like He was trying to do the right thing. Your guy who was outsourcing work was trying to do the right thing. Get things done. And it worked out like this guy had good judgment. He didn't you know, he wasn't letting this woman who was backing up his calendar.

but why why would the company care like why would the company um have a shit fit because she's reading his email and she's not bound by any of his non-disclosures Right. And she's not bound by Amazon insider trading and all kinds of stuff. So if she acts badly. Yeah, and I've got a message here in chat that my moderator slash wife is going to get the pizza, which I think is fantastic. You go for it. We got this. So we'll wrap up soon because I have to eat.

i got pizza coming too so yeah but uh look it's uh you got to make those calls as a leader to decide when to bend the rules um But I would push my team on, on, I mean, in some ways, like, you know, I pushed my team, Ethan, I'm sure you did yours too. Like, Hey, you know, you should either try to eliminate automated or make cheaper and let's task.

You know, as you see these tasks, yeah, make cheaper, right? So I can make it cheaper by outsourcing it, which is eliminate make cheaper. Yeah, because I assume I'm going to outsource it cheaper than what I pay myself. Or get better results faster. Yeah. Yeah. Or I'm going to pick up a more valuable task because it's outsourced. Right. So can I spend my stuff, spend my time on things that I have goals on? and that I'm uniquely positioned and equipped to do.

Right. So sometimes there may be people better equipped, but they're not positioned to make the decision or piece of work that I am. This is a rugby thing I take in like, hey, sometimes you look like a rugby player. I never did. You play rugby yourself. I've only played for fun. My wife, however, played in college and is in her College Hall of Fame as a leading scorer. Wow.

Our kids play, and yeah, so we still are pretty involved. This is a tough game. I'm a hockey player, so nothing but respect. Where I went to college, they wore shirts that said, give blood, play rugby. Absolutely. And rugby is a fun, there's lots of fun lessons, like this whole notion of scrum and sprint, but, you know, so yeah, rugby is fun too, because there's always two parties, you know, there's two games, you shove each other's face in the ground.

which I always described as Amazon's kind of, we're disagreeing about the customer, but now we've committed. And then there's the after party and the same guy that you've just been shoving the face of the ground. You're not arming our drinking a beer. I'm like, we should be able to do that. But.

You know, so that's kind of uniquely positioned, right? There's bigger people than me, but they're further away from the ball or there's faster people, but they're further away. And I would push my team to do the same, right? Are you really uniquely positioned and uniquely equipped? Or can you find someone else who's better equipped and better positioned to do the thing? Like the guy's calendar management. Yeah. Which, it's too bad, by the way. Look.

It's too bad that sometimes corporate policies get in the way of practical solutions. There are reasons for those policies. And look, I knew that if it did get traced back to me that I winked and nodded at this, I was taking a risk of getting fired. And I decided that for this manager, who is valuable, and for his solution, I trusted him and I was willing to gamble. But anyway, you...

Look, as a leader, you have to make those decisions about when to take a gamble to get things done. And in the end, results cover a host of sins. Now, sometimes they will get you done. But you also showed trust in your team. And so, you know, in the theme of this particular discussion, trust is a currency. Totally.

Right. And trust is a currency with leaders and your leadership team. And so that was probably repaid. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You've got to know who you can trust. And then when you show them trust, they'll show it back to you.

Oh, in space. It's like, you can't out give your wife. I don't believe you can out give your wife. You know, my wife, just like, no matter what I give to her, it's always more. I'm like, man, I can't out give my wife. Yeah. It just comes, you trust your team. And if you've hired well, then you, you built your. team and you've built the learning environment um i've always it's always found that i i my team is is repaid trust all right a couple more quick questions the question here is

Ethan, how did you possibly work 60 hours a week of pure work? How would you recommend we increment our own workload to achieve the same weekly productivity? I did work 60 hours. um at part of that time i was divorced part of that time i had a very supportive wife um the second part so i was divorced first and then got married to somebody who was also an executive and understood this life

Um, and I love my work. And so I worked a lot and then I went home. So when I was online, I was on and when I was off, I was off. I don't think you can work that long and not like what you do. I mean, I'm sure you can, by the way. I'm sure there'll be somebody in the chat who says, oh, no, I work that hard and I hate my job. But what a miserable life. I at least liked what I was doing.

Part of it is wiring. I am wired to work. I was answering someone's career question last night who was asking me, should I do job A or job B? Two really good choices. You either want to know should she go join McKinsey as a consultant or Amazon as a product manager. And I said, look, what do you actually want to do? Like it's 10 47 PM and I'm answering you, even though I'm retired and don't need to work at all.

i'm doing it because i like to help people which job is going to get you that response that when you find yourself working at 10 47 p.m working in quotes you won't feel bad about it do that job do that one and so Yeah, do that one. Pick that one. Now, these are first world problems, right? There's a woman at Kellogg at a graduate school, a good school, who has offers from McKinsey and Amazon. So she has first world problems or even zero world problems, right? No problems at all.

She may think she has problems, but she doesn't. That's how I worked. I don't know. You probably worked very hard too, Stefan. What would you say? Well, I would add to that. First off, again, I already described this. People would be like, what's the work culture at Amazon? What's your work-life balance? And I think the first part, well, I had a lot of kids. I had a lot of life. So I need a lot of work to balance my life.

But to MBA students, sometimes I say, go get a life, right? Because that's how you're going to do it. You have to have something to balance. Don't wait for your life to show up. But I would also describe hobby time and vocation time. Right. Like, Hey, you know, if you like what you do and you're having fun and it's a great opportunity, like Amazon to me was like free college. It was like free postdoc.

I could email someone like Ethan and be like, tell me about streaming. Can I buy you a coffee to get 30 minutes just for you to educate me? And nine times out of 10, he'd say, yeah, it might be two weeks, but I'll get back to you.

I could email the chief economist or whatever. So if you're fortunate enough to be in a company where you like what you do, you have to remember to put down your tools and have something you want to go to. The second thing I would add, which is just reinforce what Ethan's saying. second thing i would add though is i would um i looked at annual rhythms really carefully and so my wife was on board with she knew what op1 was you know this annual planning cycle

The six weeks before we present our annual plan, she's like, I'm taking the kids and we're going on a trip to see my mom. You know, good luck. Hope it goes well, because I know you're going to be working 60 to 80 hours for the next, you know, six weeks. and like a farmer pulling in his harvest you know and then it's done and i scheduled a vacation for the weekend after because also people get into unhealthy habits it takes six weeks to build a habit

And if you get into this, like, I'm going to work overtime and push real hard, you know, careful of your habits. That just became a habit. Do you want it to be? And the answer may be yes, but you should make that an intentional, thoughtful choice. And so I've made sure I break that habit. So over the course of a year, I work 50 hour weeks. Some weeks I work 60, some weeks I work 40. So keep that seasonality and that rhythm in mind.

Because there's times you want to work hard. Or you have to. Sorry. Answer your question in chat. Someone asked me, is my purpose public? Is it something I share? Yeah, it's a banner on my website, right? I have the luxury look. People ask me, am I entitled to all kinds of things? Isn't it fun? isn't it fun and rewarding yeah like helping people like you know and i i

I admit I have zero, you know, there's people talk about first world problems. I need to, I've decided mine are zeroth world, right? Like I get to come on here and chat with interesting people and we have a ball and we help people in the bargain. Like who, you know, what's not to like?

yeah what's not the like uh so super super privileged in that sense but um look uh if you have that chance great and you earn your way to it right i earned my way to it by earning my stripes at a lot of other places So the last question I'm going to take tonight super quickly is what does a typical product manager, product manager paper at Amazon look like?

And I'm going to cheat my way through this and say, we've answered this before. Go read Working Backwards by Bill Carr and Colin Breyer because they will show you an example and tell you exactly that. So there is a great book written about it. i don't need to answer it stefan's gonna hold it up there it is that book just came out it's not by us go get it and read it and you'll have your answer um i'm gonna look at these others real quick

So I would add Ethan again, it explains in the book, it's less about writing and more about decision making. It's more about good thinking. Right. yeah it's less about writing it is more about good thinking um one of the things the book will say and that i believe is good writing comes from clear thinking and so you get your thinking clear and then you just put that down in words so

So the other question here somebody has asked is about career transitions. And that's my next show. We're actually going to do a career planning show with another guest on Thursday. And so to answer that question, which I'll put up here, but not answer is we're going to come back on Thursday. We're going to have a guest on who wants to make a career transition. And yeah.

Somebody wants to ask me about Pittsburgh, where I went to school. Do you hear who that guest is, Ethan? The guest is Matt McCluskey. Matt McCluskey was a director, worked for me at Twitch. He ran Twitch Commerce. He formerly was CFO of the Halo franchise at 343 Studios at Microsoft.

He's now outside doing his own thing. I think he's doing something really interesting. He's working, trying to modernize Toys R Us in Canada. So Toys R Us went out in the US, but it's still... existent in canada and so he switched to the games and toys business so anyway he has a model of how to architect a career transition because he was educated as a lawyer He came out as a lawyer, became a CFO, then became a business leader.

So he's been through some transitions and just like Stefan reached out to me and said, should we have a talk about this? Can we share it on your channel? And we had a great time. Matt wants to come on and share his model for how to do that. So anything else you want to add, Stefan? Anything you want to say in wrapping up? I'll give the mic back to you. And thank you for your generous donation of time. And it's been a blast bouncing ideas off you.

Thank you. I was going to say the same. First off, I think it's been helpful to articulate some thoughts around teams. looking at teams and amazon and then translating that to other environments so thanks for sharing your time to bounce that off and and be able we can do it in front of this audience uh is is super fun enjoyable as well

So looking forward to another opportunity if one comes up that I can share to your show and share to your audience. I'm sure you'll be back. And I have to come see you sometime. You live, even though your company is called Vantage, you live in Moscow, Idaho. Is that right? Yeah, I do. So we're in the Palouse here. It's great fly fishing and rafting in the summer.

A lot of good outdoor mountain biking and stuff through all four seasons. Yeah, I need to spend more time in Idaho. I mean, I have a lot of things I want to do, but I need to spend more time in Idaho. It's such a beautiful place. The Sawtooth. Is it McLean? Is that? McCall. McCall. Yeah, between here and Boisey. It's just beautiful. I was last in Idaho for any amount of time during the eclipse. That's where we came. We put the effort in to get. So, yeah.

we we put in the effort to get right under the eclipse which by the way i'll say for anybody who's never done it if you ever have the chance being under a total eclipse and seeing darkness in the daytime and It's like the most interesting three minutes you can you can achieve so All right So with that, I will let Stefan go. I'll take on, unless you want to hear my answer, somebody's banging away about what do I think of Pittsburgh. Are you curious or not? Because I can let you go.

You know, I've been to Pittsburgh. I got to go recruit a Pittsburgh in the middle of winter. Pittsburgh, I kind of claim in the Midwest, because if you come from Pittsburgh, you know, people work. There's a history of work and grit in Pittsburgh, and you've dealt with snow. I've been there. I'm going to let you go on that. But yeah, it's a good signal to me.

Thanks again for your help. It's fun. I love building companies and giving them new vantage points. By the way, if you need somebody, let me do a plug for what Stefan does. If you know somebody or you need to learn his ability. is to work with another leader on how to implement and optimize the checkout process. Basically, how can you take your business and get people to buy from it the way they buy from Amazon?

He's got the knowledge to work through the process of you've got some product and nobody's buying it. Nobody's finding your website and there's friction in your checkout process. He understands that soup to nuts and he's working with a company he's told me about just by applying. what he learned at amazon and letting them do the same things their sales have gone through the roof now that's like i mean look super secret right he's he's been inside what he called the money button of the internet

And he knows how to go apply that money button in the Internet's technology to your company and your website. So he's at vantageleader.com. And that's your opportunity.

so thanks guys it's fun to help people shop all right thanks ethan see you guys cheers so i'm gonna let him go and uh let's see i gotta manage my different controls here i'll bring it back to me all right so pittsburgh we're gonna we're gonna wind up talking about pittsburgh why not let's have some fun uh i spent 14 years in the berg on and off um And what the hell do I think of Pittsburgh? So Pittsburgh was known when I went there. Its nickname was hell with the lid off.

And that was the old reputation of Pittsburgh back in the day. Hell with the lid off. And it was called that. Whoa, what the hell did I do there? I just screwed up my display. trying to grab the window grab the overlay instead all right it was known as hell with the lid off so i've said that like four times now while i've been adjusting my screen sorry deal with it suck it up it had a terrible reputation

But it was the first big city I ever lived in. I was a farm boy. So I found it fascinating. Like it was great. I was away from home. I made friends. So I love Pittsburgh. i now recognize it for what it is it is a midwest city it has problems it was great i uh but it look let me organize this um I preferred Pittsburgh to where I was from.

Because it had the amenities of a city and it had outdoors with the mountains. So I learned to ski there. I went spelunking in a cave for the first time. There was outdoor adventure in woods.

Then I had the chance to move to D.C., Boston, and finally Seattle. And look, Pittsburgh can't compete on assets. But... there's nothing wrong with pittsburgh and there's a lot of fun stuff the people there are passionate about their city they have uh they have a great local regional accent that gets made a lot of fun of but they're also proud of In other places, you say y'all or you-ins, but in Pittsburgh, it's yinz, Y-I-N-Z. And so the people in Pittsburgh are known as yinzers.

uh as one of their nicknames and they have they drop the word uh to be or the the they so that it's a it's a complete sentence in pittsburgh to say the car needs washed uh you can leave the to be out So, yeah, it's a city with a strong local culture and very cool. It's tough people. You know, the fellow in chat here is new and is talking about Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh and a lot of the Midwest has the problem, not just Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, where I'm originally from. I'm from near Cincinnati, a lot of Ohio, a lot of the Midwest. It has the problem that. The the the more educated people the people more opportunity have moved away to the coast we were talking earlier

About people moving away to the coast and people who had moved to the west coast Yeah, it is true. There's ignorance everywhere if you look for it edgy is right about that but second people move to the coasts to get more opportunity what does that mean though it leaves behind the people in the midwest who haven't for whatever reason they haven't made that move and it's thinned out the ambition there uh and look a lot of the small towns near where i'm from in ohio

i call as method i call them meth infected hell holes because there's no hope left for the people there are no good jobs or not no but there's very little good opportunity And they fall into drugs and meth and problems. And it's sad. So I'm not here to rain on them. I hope the Midwest changes and is reinvigorated. But look, economic opportunity has always moved. People came to the new world from the old world to get opportunity first.

you know first Columbus looking for opportunity to get to the Indies and then the spanish looking for opportunity in quotes to exploit natural resources and people and i'm not saying they were good that's not my point but they came here for opportunity you can bet their ass about that their opportunity was to take gold from the people who had it

and that was an opportunity so they did it it's not i mean it's good but they moved for opportunity um and then settlers moved for religious freedom and on and on you don't need a history lesson from me um

But the point is people have always moved for opportunity. And right now, people are moving out of the Midwest, including Pittsburgh, for opportunity elsewhere. And that... uh you know uh i love pittsburgh i love to visit i have good friends there but that is generally a true statement that they have out migration now covid may reverse some of that people are now out migrating away from the high rents on the coast so covid may change some stuff

so so anyway uh people go where opportunity is right um and they don't worry about what they're leaving behind um so i will i'm happy i moved but i i somebody asked me what i like about pittsburgh look i chose my um sports teams there that's where i formed my sports allegiances so i love the hockey team i love the football team um you know so uh I don't know. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Pittsburgh, but I'm okay having left.

and it's no longer hell with the lid off at least it's no longer uh gross and and whatever and the pizza is here so that's my cue hey if i was ever had a reason to leave it had been fantastic to see you all I hope you will come back Thursday where we'll have Matt McCluskey and a guest go through a career path planning and transition plan.

With that, I've had so many great guests here today in chat, so many great contributors. Pentaquan, if you're still listening, thank you for the gifts. Duke of Thought, good to see you here. A lot of new people. um joining in a lot of sub gifts and subs thank you all and i hope to see you join our discord follow me on linkedin and i look forward to talking to you all in a few days I switched my displays, making it hard to go offline.