azzthrooww

And while I gave insight as to what it's actually like working with teams at Amazon, you've spouted speculation based on no experience or knowledge and now it sounds like you have nothing valuable to add to this discussion. /shrug

Your quote listed two different distinct groups of people that are both customers of Amazon: consumers and sellers. And there's a third group that isn't listed: the ad companies which are also customers of Amazon. And what's best for one of those groups isn't necessarily what is best for the other group.

So no, it's not very clear.

It really isn't a meme. It's taken pretty seriously at the company, often gets cited in meetings as a reason to do (or not do) something, and is almost always referenced in large strategic projects/planning docs. It's even sometimes included in criteria for determining performance/promotions.

The problem lies in the fact that there's no one single definition of who "the customer" is, and no one single definition of what the best thing for that customer is. One team might see customer obsession as making sure only the best ads are shown, but there's probably another team who thinks that being obsessed about customers means showing the _most_ ads, while a third team sees _the ad companies_ as "the customer" and thinks that being customer obsessed means making them as happy as possible.

There's a weird side effect about being so serious about customer obsession. Like I mentioned earlier, it's often used as a promotion criteria, so people will come up with weird stuff and then spin it as "customer obsessed" so they can get promoted, even if it's something like showing more ads or constantly reminding people to buy something (which probably gets spun as "helping the customer to not miss out on a good deal" or something like that).