Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
The Amazon Way - Coggle Diagram
The Amazon Way
Automation is the key to scaling. Small manual tasks may seem small but when you scale it, it's not economical.
-
Always ask: if I had to completely automate the process and eliminate all manual steps, how would I design it.
It's hard to automate verifying image quality for miklaa, so you can use customer reviews to flag this stuff. If there are thousands of images coming in a day, you don't want too many people just to verify so use customer feedback as a flagging system.
Amazon created a platform that connected businesses with freelancers to do menial jobs like product descriptions.
Amazon had a very small team in the start so onboarding sellers had to be done by the sellers onboarding themselves. Amazon didn't have the manpower nor did they want to do this process.
-
Direct headcount - people with skills that are essential to build a scalable company.
Indirect headcount - people who don't directly create a better customer experience.
-
You can make a sort of sellers' handbook with checklists the seller can tick off if they've met quality standards. Fe, are your photos 1080p?
You could create your own index of these checklists and give priority to those who score high. Fe, we show your properties first after the advertised properties.
6 ways to earn someone's trust: (1) accept your own mistakes and own up to it, (2) take the hit for your team also, (3) praise your team in front of others, (4) don't micromanage, (5) accept confrontation and engage in open discussion of opposing views, and (6) find the value in each person and harness it.
-
When a customer is unhappy, they won't tell 2 or 3 friends, they'll tell way more than that.
The best customer service is no customer service because the best experience is when a customer doesn't need to ask for help at all.
98% of people who require customer service on Amazon ask one thing - where's my stuff? Early on, Bezos put a tab that allows customers to track their order therefore customers never needed to contact support.
-
The Holy Trinity: price, selection, and convenience.
Apple failed to ship 4000 ipods to Amazon in time for the holidays, so Amazons bought 4000 at retail just to keep the promise to their customers. Take the idea: money is not as valuable as keeping your promise when you're playing a long-term game.
Andon cord - pull it and the entire manufacturing process stops. E.g. you're on the manufacturing line at Toyota, trying to install a widget on a Toyota car but its not fitting. Pull the cord. Staff come to see the defect and fix it so that no other car has this same problem. Once fixed, production resumes.
Amazon doesn't focus too much on its competitors. Fe, target because it thinks Target is only expanding using its extending skill base. When you focus on the customer, sure you have to learn new skills but you're serving the purpose directly.
For innovation to work, many factors have to align. It has to fulfill a real customer need; the experience has to be great; the operations have to scale; unit economics have to be in line; and market adoption has to be primed.
-
Don't use powerpoints to discuss ideas. Make staff write down their ideas in narratives - on a piece of paper. Hand it out to the people in the meeting at the start and let them read it for 10 minutes.
One thing that is constantly repeated in the book is that Bezos always used METRICS for everything and it only makes sense.
Amazon had this thing of creating press releases about a product before they even began development of the product. Why? So that everyone understands what is being done and more importantly, management can hold the team accountable and use it as a metric for progress.
-
Keep a metric for how sellers are performing on miklaa. Did the agent not answer the phone? How many 1 or 2 star reviews does the agent have? Was the agent late? Did the agent not show up?
Jeff personally approved of each new employee in the start. The best thing to ask yourself when hiring someone is "Will this person raise the IQ of the company?"
SLA (service level agreements) - specifies the precise standards to which a particular service will be held. Fe, if a house listed on miklaa is rented, the listing should be inactivated within 24 hours max. Bezos used this for things like page load times, inventory changes, etc. The idea is that even the worst SLA for Amazon was better than the best of everyone else.
THINK BIG. You want miklaa in the whole of the middle east. Think how to create systems that allow for this.
-
Frugality forces you to innovate. All lightbulbs from vending machines in fulfilment centers were removed and used for the 2009 annual meeting.
When there is a problem, use the WHY exercise to determine what it is. First, write the problem out. Then ask why this happened and keep asking why until you get to the root cause.
Bezos barely spends time focusing on the financial results of the company. Why? Because you can't control it. What you can control are the inputs like number of new projects created per year, or customer satisfaction, etc. Get the inputs right and the outputs will follow.
-