Thoughts on (Amazonian) Leadership

Colin Percival · 1 Sept 2025

Others here said this too

Listening to customers is invaluable, but you should not build the thing they asked you for.

Their wordsCustomer Obsession is great, but I often see Amazonians taking this too simplistically: "Start with the customer" doesn't have to mean "ask customers what they want and then give them faster horses".

Also said by Evan Spiegel

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Listening to customers is invaluable, but you should not build the thing they asked you for.

Their wordsCustomer Obsession is great, but I often see Amazonians taking this too simplistically: "Start with the customer" doesn't have to mean "ask customers what they want and then give them faster horses".
Our reading
Working with the entire ecosystem produces better long-term results than focusing solely on your own organization's immediate needs.
Mental modelPlay long games

Their wordsWhile the same does not directly apply in other fields, working with others to produce the best results for everyone will be much better in the long-term than focusing solely on what Amazon needs right now.
Our reading
Shipping a half-baked product permanently damages customer trust, even after it is later fixed.

Their wordsWhen AWS ships a service which is half-baked, it diminishes customer trust in AWS as a whole; even if the problems in that service ultimately get corrected (either by fixing them or in some cases by simply getting rid of a service which should never have existed in the first place) the memory of a failed launch will live on in customers' minds for years to come.

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