High Scalability offers some secrets to Amazon’s success based on interviews and writings of early employees. Some of the choice bits are below.
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Teams are small. They are assigned authority and empowered to solve a problem as a service in anyway they see fit.
Work from the customer backward. Focus on value you want to deliver for the customer.
Force developers to focus on value delivered to the customer instead of building technology first and then figuring how to use it.
Start with a press release of what features the user will see and work backwards to check that you are building something valuable.
End up with a design that is as minimal as possible. Simplicity is the key if you really want to build large distributed systems.
Take it for granted stuff fails, that’s reality, embrace it. For example, go more with a fast reboot and fast recover approach. With a decent spread of data and services you might get close to 100%. Create self-healing, self-organizing lights out operations.
Open up your system with APIs and you’ll create an ecosystem around your application.
Only way to manage as large distributed system is to keep things as simple as possible. Keep things simple by making sure there are no hidden requirements and hidden dependencies in the design. Cut technology to the minimum you need to solve the problem you have. It doesn’t help the company to create artificial and unneeded layers of complexity.
There’s bound to be problems with anything that produces hype before real implementation.
Use measurement and objective debate to separate the good from the bad. I’ve been to several presentations by ex-Amazoners and this is the aspect of Amazon that strikes me as uniquely different and interesting from other companies. Their deep seated ethic is to expose real customers to a choice and see which one works best and to make decisions based on those tests.
Getting rid of the influence of the HiPPO’s, the highest paid people in the room. This is done with techniques like A/B testing and Web Analytics. If you have a question about what you should do code it up, let people use it, and see which alternative gives you the results you want.
Create a frugal culture. Amazon used doors for desks, for example.
People’s side projects, the one’s they follow because they are interested, are often ones where you get the most value and innovation. Never underestimate the power of wandering where you are most interested.
Have a way to rollback if an update doesn’t work. Write the tools if necessary.
Look for three things in interviews: enthusiasm, creativity, competence. The single biggest predictor of success at Amazon.com was enthusiasm.
Hire a Bob. Someone who knows their stuff, has incredible debugging skills and system knowledge, and most importantly, has the stones to tackle the worst high pressure problems imaginable by just leaping in.
Innovation can only come from the bottom. Those closest to the problem are in the best position to solve it. any organization that depends on innovation must embrace chaos. Loyalty and obedience are not your tools.
Everyone must be able to experiment, learn, and iterate. Position, obedience, and tradition should hold no power. For innovation to flourish, measurement must rule.
Embrace innovation. In front of the whole company, Jeff Bezos would give an old Nike shoe as a “Just do it” award to those who innovated.
[via JL (NSFW?)]
Steve Brewer
on 17 Sep 07I really like “start with the press release…” It’s so true – how many times have you slaved for months over a new release, and then the press releases focus on three things that were added as afterthoughts.
As a developer, it’s easy to think of the hardest problems as the most important, but very there are huge consumer wins hiding behind very small changes.
FredS
on 17 Sep 07Lodwick’s site is slightly NSFW, guys. How bout a head’s up?
Joel
on 17 Sep 07Nice. Very Get Real-ish, no?
Brad
on 17 Sep 07Too bad the current company is only a vague shell of what it used to be. Internal operations are nothing like this anymore.
Chris
on 17 Sep 07Brad is right – too many gut decisions being made about things that used to require hard data.
Marvel
on 17 Sep 07Nice summary of an excellent article. Thanks.
However each time you write about Amazon or Jeff Bezos, you should inform your readers that Jeff Bezos has a minority stake in 37signals through his personal investment company, Bezos Expeditions.
Your opinions or editorial choices could be influenced by this circumstance and readers need to know.
RJ
on 17 Sep 07I recently read a similar article on finding success in the techniques employed by Ninja Assasins. I highly recomend it.
Meth Addict
on 17 Sep 07So thats how a big company is supposed to run? I knew something was up when our company was going to take 3 years to launch a new site.
3stripe
on 17 Sep 07“Hire a Bob” – great suggestion, but where I am we would call them a “Dave”. Everyone knows a Dave, right! My mate Dave… etc etc…
Brian Webb
on 18 Sep 07What great insights! The Press Release… then the product. How simply brilliant and poignant. In our company, our products and sometimes tend to get too complex. Good words of wisdom. No doubt.
jonah
on 18 Sep 07Amazon is successful because it was first in the market, first to get sufficient funding, and first to achieve scale. Believe it or not, somebody had to be first.
David Andersson
on 18 Sep 07@jonah You’re right that they were first, what strikes me is that no real competitor has emerged, as they often do, doing the first company’s wrong things right and taking their market position.
Reis
on 18 Sep 07Jonah: Being first doesn’t mean that you will be successful, it only makes it harder for you to be able to stay at the top as more people will try to build on your errors like David said.
I mean…Yahoo was before Google, right?
And there ARE competitors to Amazon but because they were first AND continue to redefine what makes them excellent they remain on top of the game.
Manny Hernandez
on 18 Sep 07Loved this post!
My two favorite items: “Force developers to focus on value delivered to the customer instead of building technology first and then figuring how to use it” and “Getting rid of the influence of the HiPPO’s, the highest paid people in the room.”
Very true and very hard also…
Webanalyticsbook.com
on 18 Sep 07When I read this post, I thought it should be included in the “Founders at work” book, that I was currently reading. Funny when I figured out last night, that David was interviewed in the book about 20 pages later :-)
This discussion is closed.