I'm a product manager, my career history is long and varied including 25 years of running my own companies. I was at first very concerned about the Two Pizza team concept, who's in charge, how do we optimize the application of people to effort? Being a programmer I had always looked to manage the separation of concerns in my designs. I just hadn't thought about it in the real world as a pattern that could work. To me, Amazon is a massive open-source project with many teams focused deeply on a handful of topics. We share data very openly, we share learnings, we share what we're planning to do and ask for input.
My opinion is that somewhere in the history of Amazon the executive team must have realized they could not make all the decisions, that they would become the bottleneck for growth. So instead of focusing on command and control as many companies have done, they focused on how to hire leaders and teach them to think critically, take risks, learn and improve. Amazon values seeking truth and if it's not fully known then where it makes sense take risks to learn and improve the known truth. If you read about our leadership principles[1] you'll see that they're in tension with each other, they're designed to make you think, the answer isn't given to you, the way you come to answers is taught instead. An example, Dive Deep vs Bias for Action, when do you stop digging into the problem and just take action? This tension helps you think about decisions you make that impact the outcome for our customers.
Another thing that often gets overlooked is the concept of "Single Threaded Owner". I'm an STO on a topic, that means I write and communicate the known truth and our strategy and plans, I participate in discussions around that topic, I talk to customers about it, I read industry news and leverage my own experience in that topic. Others know me as that STO and reach out to me with related topics if something makes sense to me in my topic area then I try to address it, if not I connect the person with another STO I think would be interested in their idea or problem. Success at Amazon is deeply driven by networking, we have an internal tool called Phonetool which allows you to quickly navigate the company and find people who are close to the topic you have in mind. I keep thinking it's like the six degrees of separation concept, if somebody doesn't know the topic they know someone who is closer to the topic, within a couple of emails you are in a conversation with someone on the other side of the company who is passionate, fired up and knows more about the topic than you thought could be known. They're excited to talk to you about their topic and teach you or learn from your new idea related to their area of focus.
When I first started someone told me "Don't worry if other people seem to be doing the same thing, over time the best effort will return results and the other ideas will fade and those people will find new ideas to chase". I've heard it said we would rather have two people working on a thing than none. This is a path to discovery. Amazon is very data-driven when you make a statement without data you had best be ready to debate it and explain why that is your position. I myself have a long career and sometimes I just have to say "because I've done it, been there done that". Which is fine but its also awesome when you can show data. I identified a pattern that was unhealthy based on my own experience, my team came up with some metrics we could collect to quantify the issue. Now we're sharing those metrics and people all around my team are rallying around the problem.
In my career, I've run my own companies, been in start-ups that raised money, sold companies to other companies and just about everything else you can imagine. This is the closest to feeling like a startup but with the resources to create great outcomes for customers at scale. It has its challenges as do all companies of more than one person, but many of the challenges are different than I've seen in the past. When in doubt you can always raise a leadership principle and everyone will jump in and talk about how that would apply to the situation we're dealing with. That's unique for me thus far in my career most companies I've worked for have their "values" painted on the walls and that's about as far as they go. I was at a startup where we tried to be very deliberate about our values but this is deeper, cuts across the entire org and everyone is passionate about discussing what they mean for them and how they apply them to their work.
To me what is most important in my career is learning and doing it with great people, so far I've got lots of both of those things applied to problems at a scale I wouldn't have in other companies.