Published on the 23/09/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Teams at Amazon which want to innovate must start by writing a press release before developing anything…
According to Rodney Haywood, head of technology for Amazon Web Services in ANZ, this focuses the team’s attention on what it is doing and why, far better than a PowerPoint presentation does.
Haywood, a speaker at Forrester’s CMO+CIO event held in Sydney last week, gave valuable insight into the way that Amazon does innovation – and provided some clues as to why it has been so successful. He said, “Good intentions are never enough – you have to have a mechanism to get the outcome.” He said that the number one leadership principle at Amazon, which has a full complement of 14 leadership principles to steer its employees, is “customer obsession.”
“Culture is key to our success at Amazon…performance is related to how much you deliver and how closely you align to the culture.”
That was also the case for innovation efforts. “If you have this big pace of innovation you want mechanisms because good intentions aren’t enough,” said Haywood.
“Each new idea starts with a write up of a press release that helps capture the customer perspective of the problem we are trying to solve,” he said. The press release also has to feature two FAQ documents – one written from a customer perspective, the second from a corporate perspective.
After that, an innovation team has to create a narrative document – a piece of prose up to six pages long – “that describes what you are trying to do, because we don’t think PowerPoint is best way to define what you are trying to do.” And there are no shortcuts to constructing the narrative. Numbered bullet points won’t cut the mustard; it has to be a coherent piece of writing.
If the press release and the narrative pass muster then the innovation team is required to set up some metrics that would measure customer benefit, and then construct small and agile teams that will own that innovation in a DevOps manner – “if you build it you will own it,” said Haywood.
He said the final press release for a successful innovation often turned out to be uncannily similar to the one written before the idea receives the green light for funding. However, a press release which left the reader wondering why a customer might be interested was a clear warning sign that the innovation team was on the wrong track.
Once a team gets the green light and begins innovating, or managing a new service or product under Amazon’s DevOps model, it has to bring its score cards and live metrics to regular meetings, knowing that the dice will be rolled and someone will have to stand up and talk through their results.
“It keeps us honest and focussed on the customers,” said Haywood.
