https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1RD-UDE0rQ
I've never found any high quality info online for this topic save a few responses on a Quora thread. In the video I promise additional content, but I didn't realize that YouTube had certain thresholds to be able to post a link off of YT to another site, so I am including the link here: https://www.interviewat.com/pl/195251 (it's also in the video description text).
This is a good look at the process, deliverables, and outcomes when working at AMZN. For reference, I was the Director of Product Management for the Kindle sw platform. I probably handled no fewer than 10 question mark emails from Jeff over the 3 years I was there.
If it's important, they'll follow up.
I've been a CEO and CTO, but usually in <100 employee companies, so as busy as I might've been, I could ask, "What's up with this?"
I think among all his possible sins, at Amazon scale, "?" itself wouldn't rank super high.
Would not apply in this case however...
Someone who can't be bothered to type more than "?" might not bother to check for an answer either.
CEO's are busy, if the mail is short, that's ok.
But are you suggesting we should not discuss anything but the biggest problems?
Of course this kind of this kind of thing is important to individual businesses and needs to be done, it's just a shame to see "The Best Minds of My Generation Are Thinking About How To Make People Click Ads"
I was at AWS, 2008-2014. In the early days, Bezos would frequently comment on AWS-related stuff, such as daily EC2 revenues, etc.
Occasionally, despite I wasn't an executive back then, I would also be one of the tens of email recipients that angry Amazon customers would use to shout their anger at the company (because my public facing role of tech evangelist, and my @simon Twitter handle).
I have to say, I don't think that Amazon's and Jeff's success has much to do with a "?" email, or the ":)" email I saw a few times. These are simply a shortcut for slightly longer sentences - "what do you say about this?", and "Nice work! :)".
Jeff's success, in my view, is an amazing capacity to hire excellent people, and being able to drive them to work crazy hours and feel like founders, despite not having share ownership in accordance to their work. Most of them, especially the early ones, are rich beyond any imagination. They could have been richer, sure... But they could also not.
Also, the organizational structure at Amazon, with every team having to provide APIs for their product, is also genius. AWS could have not happened without that.
Doesn't seem like they sleep on the street either. :)
Probably all due to the stifling effect of a single character email
I do get it though, in my own company we constantly compare ourselves to the competitor, but we never actually do a competitor analysis, it's like we're scared or something to use their product.
I mean, obviously what he's telling us is that they've got a stupid broken culture and their intuition about their product is hilariously wrong, but it's still an interesting insight.
If your star average goes below 4.5, put out a quickie point release. That would reset the reviews, and the review prompt would drive a 5 star instantly.
IIRC, I'd also divide all the users into buckets, and stage out review prompts by week. You never want negative reviews stacked alongside each other in the review list. Multiple negative reviews is the kiss of death for conversion - rank drop could happen fast.
By staggering review prompts, you'd get positive reviews rolling in every single week, with a surge up front.
Obviously, that doesn't mean _ignore_ the negative reviews. Those are generally critical product failures. That necessitates response. We'd group and measure review categories, and reach out to affected users to see how they felt about potential and shipped solutions. Product quality is step one on good reviews.
None of that means setting your business on fire because of negative reviews. At the same time it's a critical signal to be dealt with, there's an immediate business problem of minimizing or eliminating the impact of negative reviews.
They're two different swim lanes requiring two different processes.
That's a funny thing to say, because as a user all I ever want from online reviews is the negative reviews stacked together. Positive reviews are only noise, in the way. The only question is what sort of negative reviews are there?
Strategizing as you describe is depressing to me because it suggests the public mostly uses reviews in the wrong way.
Not sure why this person is giggling and feeling excited about this in the video. The sender doesn't care, I don't care, Who cares.
Move along now nothing to see here.
This PM seems like an A-player, but he was caught flat footed, hence the "?"
The "?" email means you dropped a ball. If I were doing an armchair RCA on it, I'd posit the problem was a disconnect in the relationship between Product and Marketing, where marketing would have already known they were getting hammered on reviews - and that they mattered - but Product was probably indexed on the wrong stakeholders, likely in the engineering org given, a) that the PM could code at all meant eng was still his comfort zone, and b) the focus on being seen to ship a release. My read of it was he dropped the ball because he backed the wrong horse and misunderstood the priorities of the company. Of course you drop everything to fix it, you f'd up.
Unfortunately, just sending "?" emails to staff doesn't create the culture where they are meaningful. Sending "?" messages doesn't make you Jeff Bezos. I'd argue they are an artifact of a very specific local culture in AMZN. If managers in other orgs imitated that aspect of it, thinking now they're doing the real Bezo-ing, they would be just doing a cargo cult management ritual.
And how does it all resolve? Oh right, the B&N App is pretty good, and they ask their users for reviews. Which the Kindle team would know if any of them had bothered to pay attention to what their competition is doing in the first place. Notice how the original point was that the B&N App had more better reviews? And how the solution was not to build a better Kindle App - it was to juice the metrics.
Brandon here gives a great overview of his experience here. but I'm sorry that so many intelligent people have to be bootlickers to CEO whims and that we inculcate that lesson for our new hires and new engineers. (ie the CEO is 'GOD')
Of course a CEO gets to dictate policy..but if it happens on a whim or for certain empathy deficient folks like Bezos after another CEO eggs him on..
To me a decent work life balance is paramount..but ambitious people have other priorities -Life's to short to waste your weekend analyzing app store review data esp if you or your team of engineers is busy doing what the company wants in the first place.
Bezos, Musk, Jobs, Gates or our own CEO we drink the corporate kool-aid and keep worshiping these guys.. at what cost?
I really do not get this religious approach to other pepole.
Dang! As I understood, were you guys one of the teams with the craziest work hours over there?
How did you handle the work-life balance?
> "Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread."
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
It's probably better posting either the video itself as a submission.
