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The future has already arrived, and any company that wants to be in demand tomorrow and make money today must innovate regularly, adore its customers and manage its employees correctly. Like Amazon. "What Would Bezos Do?" This is the question that John Rossman, a business consultant and former top executive at Amazon, hears the most. This inspirational book answers some of the most popular questions about culture, growth strategies, technology and how to apply it correctly. You will become familiar with the approaches that have allowed Amazon to become the undisputed leader and can use work ideas to improve business processes and become a digital company. In this book, you will learn how to:- improve service and get satisfied customers - manage small autonomous teams - make decisions faster and better - solve the problem of innovation lag - be a digital and modern company, regardless of scale
You are the product director
A friend of mine told the story of how, after completing his bachelor's degree in 1994, he got a job at a small tech company that was developing supercapacitors in Los Gatos, California. When his boss showed him the workroom, a friend found it littered with maps of the San Francisco Bay.
“Sorry about the mess,” the manager told him, shoveling the cards into the trash can.
- And what are these cards for?
“We had to fire an employee who worked before you because he was constantly involved in personal projects right at work,” said the manager. - These are his things.
When my friend settled in a new place, he took off the sign with the name of the dismissed employee and hung up his own. Years will pass, and of course MapQuest, Tesla and SpaceX will make that name on the removed plaque widely known. Then it was just memorable.
“Elon Musk,” my friend said. - Strange name. Strange guy.
Even today, decades later, it is said that Musk spends 80% of his time designing and designing.1 Just think, one of the most influential business leaders in the world spends only 20% of his time managing people. The product is so important to the Mask.
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Amazon's fourth leadership principle is "Get everything right." To be right at Amazon, a leader must have relevant experience and knowledge and be extremely attentive to detail. The traditional (read "legacy") leadership model is managing budget, people, and departments. The greater the managerial load, the stronger the leader. The “big coin” was usually the people or the budget that was run by the manager. Historically, these executives have said to their subordinates, "Just do your job." Seemingly simple at first, this type of management and control requires a lot of trust in those charged with the task. Sometimes things go well, sometimes not. In any case, these leaders rarely understand why something worked or didn't work.
At Amazon, senior executives are often responsible for the “big deal” from the start, and they tend to have few employees and a small budget. They have a comprehensive approach to business, evaluating and considering the project from all angles, and are the original idea leaders.
Product management requires certain skills, some of which may have been depleted over the years as people got promoted. If we were young, perhaps we would be very talented product managers. However, as we moved away from the real work and into the foggy world of management, we may have lost our advantages. All of a sudden, as a product manager, you are expected to present an idea (see Idea 44 for an essay), interview, study customer experiences, clarify technical requirements, and logically justify market requirements and target production costs. You must be a "creator".
There are many benefits to being a product director. There comes a time when the "creator" has to dust off an old set of building tools. First, the project will only benefit from your many years of experience. Attention to the smallest detail will set a new tone for the organization. Everyone should analyze the details carefully. You can move freely from top to bottom employees and back. Develop personal relationships and influence team members at all levels, even those with whom you usually have little contact at work.
For example, Musk is said to work directly in the studio for half a day every week with Tesla's lead designer Franz von Holzhausen. The mask is always deeply concerned about product-related problems. Elon participates in the creative process. He is always in touch with the product team; the team respects him very much. And this is no coincidence.
As a product director, you must lead by example. But it's not enough just to share experiences and be attentive to detail. You should demonstrate that you are being judged by the same rules using a scorecard. There is nothing worse than a leader who evaluates himself on a different scale than other employees. In general, everything is at the same time, and as a product director you must convince others of this.
It is important that the team understands that you are on the same boat with them, that you are creating a top quality product. However, as we will see in the next chapter, if you intend to implement game-changing innovations, be prepared to be misunderstood by your opponents.
Are you ready to be misunderstood?
What are Amazon's most outstanding innovations? Drones? Cloud computing? Echo smart speaker with Alexa assistant? They are all impressive; some of them are even revolutionary.
However, I believe that Amazon's greatest innovations are those that have changed the fundamentals of competition so much that they now seem mundane. I have free daily shipping, Prime Loyalty, and Product Authority on my list of Amazon's key innovations. The service is deceptively simple, with multiple sellers of the same product registered under Product Authority to expand choice, availability and price competition. This was a unique advantage that led Amazon to overtake eBay in the mid-2000s as a site for third-party sellers.
As these innovations were introduced, Amazon received negative reviews from most of its target audience.
Idea 11. The most powerful and underestimated aspect of innovation is challenging conventional wisdom about how things work. When you create an alternative to these views, it is expected that there will be many skeptics.What did these innovations have in common other than being implemented at Amazon? To begin with, they all rely on customer experience and business model innovation. In fact, they are not that functional. They are also united by the fact that market players and industry experts have grossly underestimated their impact on the industry itself and bottom line. Innovation was introduced when Amazon first appeared on the market, did not enjoy the respect and fear of competitors, as it is now. Here are some examples:
"Amazon will bring everyone under the monastery with its game [free shipping]."
Bob Schwartz, former president of Magento, founder of Nordstrom.com
“The voice assistant is really useful in a lot of cases, but that doesn't mean you don't need a screen at all. I think the lack of a screen [in Amazon Echo] will be inconvenient in some situations. "
Philip Schiller, Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing
“While recent stories and reports of a new company that competes with the three major carriers in the United States are headlong, this is the case. Duplicating the experience of networks such as FedEx would have taken tens of billions of dollars and a very long time to reach this scale and have an equally wide presence in the market. This is extremely difficult to do. "
Mike Glenn, Executive Vice President, FedEx
“We do not believe that our suppliers selling their products directly through Amazon are an imminent threat. There is no prerequisite for any of our partners to want to sell the premium sports product, the $ 100 and above sneakers that we offer, directly through this sales channel. "
Richard Johnson, CEO and Chairman of Foot Locker
“As long as you're comparing the online and offline shopping experience, we don't need artificial intelligence in stores. We have a lively intelligence. There are 4500 consultants in our stores. "
Mark Metrick, President of Saks Fifth Avenue
“What the hell is cloud computing? <…> This is complete nonsense. "
Larry Ellison, Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer, Oracle
“I'm really not worried about that [AWS]. We need to worry about ourselves. We are in a very favorable position. "
Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle
All these public statements from hard-core industry leaders remind me of a classic quote from Thomas Watson, chairman of the board of IBM, who said in 1943, "I think the world market exists for perhaps only five computers."
Over the years, as Amazon disrupted the market order and changed business traditions one by one through innovation, powerful market players fought it off with taunts and firing. For Bezos, this is being "misunderstood." If you are going to innovate, you must be prepared not only to be misunderstood, but also to be indifferent. Many competitors don't see the point in Amazon. "This is the most confusing, chaotically growing and - for the endless sea of ​​competitors - the most terrible company in the world." If you don't upset anyone with your actions, you probably aren't breaking the rules either.
: . — . - : « . , . ?» , : « , . , ».Take, for example, a service feature such as Look Inside the Book. In 2001, Amazon launched a program based on a simple concept of imitating a bookstore, where an Amazon user can flip through a book before buying.
Of course, Amazon had to post the content of the books on the site to do this, which raised questions about copyright infringement. The publishers were skeptical about this. The cost of the program was expected to be very high. Each book had to be digitally scanned and indexed. This has become a huge logistical challenge.
Jeff approved a large-scale launch of the service, admitting that this is the only way to know if the program will work with 43 million active Amazon customer accounts. By the number of books - 120,000 - the debut surpassed all expectations. The database was 20 terabytes in size, about 20 times larger than the largest database in existence when Amazon was founded.
David Richer was Amazon's senior vice president of product and store development, responsible for growing the company's revenues from $ 16 million to over $ 4 billion. He described the strategy for launching Look Inside the Book: “If we had previously tested the technology on a small number of books, say a thousand or two, it’s unlikely that the resonance among the public and consumers would have been the same. There is a factor of surprise: how will it look in practice? This is both a big investment and a high opportunity cost. All these are random actions. Jeff is ready to go on this adventure. " Ultimately, publishers appreciated the Look Inside the Book program as a sales advantage.
, - , , — Kindle AWS, — . : , , , . , , , ; , . . : , . : «, », .A recent example of Amazon voluntarily wanting to be "misunderstood" is its overall healthcare strategy. Working with Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase to create an as-yet-unnamed healthcare company headed by Atul Gawande, how will Amazon change the way it delivers healthcare and insurance to its employees? Maybe their strategy is to sell drugs to hospitals? Or integrating the PillPack service into the Prime program and reducing the cost of delivering prescription drugs to clients (along with the new book)? Or are they doing it to change clients' health and insurance habits and cost structures, which is a daunting task for both business and staff? Or something else? Doubt Amazon will clarify this in the near future,and hope they add more healthcare investments to their portfolio.
There are two sides to the “misunderstood” position. First, with a major innovation goal that will dramatically change the customer experience and business model, you should be concerned if different business participants are not skeptical. Second, it is important to prepare stakeholders such as investors and partners for the negative consequences. Oftentimes, Amazon reminds investors in its annual letter to shareholders that it will seek long-term results rather than sacrificing long-term gain for short-term results, and more often than not, this position will be misunderstood. Are you ready to be misunderstood?
»More details about the book can be found on the website of the publishing house
» Table of contents
» Excerpt
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