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The importance of improving software systems incrementally. I was six months into working at Amazon when my team was gearing up for our big MLP (minimum lovable product instead of MVP) launch of Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). I was asked to implement the collection of fees that Amazon would charge third-party sellers for using its fulfillment services (namely picking, packing, and shipping inventory on behalf of the seller). I gladly accepted. One week in, I started to regret

How to drive a culture of builders inside your company I am a builder. That would be the title of my movie if someone was ever crazy enough to make a film about me. Jeff Bezos said it the best. “A builder’s mentality helps us approach big, hard-to-solve opportunities with a humble conviction that success can come through iteration: invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again. They know the path to success is anything but straight.” I have

How Joint scrums can drive results and make better decisions A family that eats together stays together. It’s a line that my mother often cited on why it was so important to eat dinner at the table versus my preferred place near the TV. I miss those family dinners, mostly because of the food, but also because of the conversation and connection we built. When I joined Amazon back in 2006, I had the great fortune of being a part of the Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) team. I was

How to drive root cause analysis and fix defects at any company When was the last time your systems failed and there was a customer impact? I’ve had this happen hundreds of times in my career. Sometimes I was the engineer that caused the issue, especially in my early years at Amazon, and sometimes I was the General Manager of mission-critical services. So shit happened - your service is not functioning and you are not responsive. The first critical task is resolving the cu

Moving forward from Amazon and AWS