(2017-04-15) Amazon Bezos Letter Day2

Amazon's Jeff Bezos on how do you fend off Day 2? (avoiding BigCo stagnancy)

Here's a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making

True Customer Obsession

You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.

Resist Proxies

A common example is process as proxy

You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you're doing the process right. Gulp (Cargo Cult, Best Practices)

Another example: market research and customer surveys can become proxies for customers (Metrics) You, the product or service owner, must understand the customer, have a vision, and love the offering. Then, beta testing and research can help you find your blind spots. A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.

Embrace External Trends

These big trends are not that hard to spot (they get talked and written about a lot), but they can be strangely hard for large organizations to embrace. We're in the middle of an obvious one right now: machine learning and artificial intelligence. (BandWagon)

Fourth, recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately

Sometimes teams have different objectives and fundamentally different views. They are not aligned. No amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion. Whoever has more stamina carries the decision... “You’ve worn me down” is an awful decision-making process. It’s slow and de-energizing. Go for quick escalation instead – it’s better.