Why Amazon's culture makes me a better engineer (5 principles)

Discover the secrets behind Amazon's success and apply their leadership principles as an engineer. Learn effective communication strategies, setting clear expectations, and making decisions.

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This is a compilation of public information and an opinion commentary on them
All opinions here are my own.

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If I traveled tomorrow to China, I wouldn’t understand a word.

That was the first feeling when I joined Amazon.

Everybody talked in a shared language I didn’t understand it, even if they used English words.

But after onboarding, I got the vocabulary.

And now working is much easier, we talk the same language.

I love learning about company culture and after watching an interview with Jeff Bezos, I decided to write about these principles.

In this post, you’ll learn

• How to communicate with any other job family, and understand each other.

• How to set a company-wide standard of expectations at your job.

• How to make decisions when all alternatives seem feasible.

• How to create principles for your systems, and still maintain an open mindset to change opinions.

• How to make a plan for the most extravagant visions, and achieve them

🪷 #1 Leadership principles

It doesn’t matter if you are an engineer or an accountant.

To be a top performer, everyone expects you to never say “That’s not my problem”

People expect they can trust you when you start doing some work…

This is what the leadership principles define. They are independent of the job family. Besides a common vocabulary for day-to-day situations, they also serve for promotions and performance evaluation.

This is a concept Jeff Bezos has created both at Amazon and Blue Origin.

All companies define similar cultural principles:

• Amazon: “Bias for action”.

• Facebook: “Move fast and break things”.

• Revolut: “Get (sh)it done”.

They are not novel ideas. But they are a vocabulary people can use to communicate.

The same vocabulary is used in engineer team meetings as in the letters to shareholders.

Long-term thinking is both a requirement and an outcome of true ownership. Owners are different from tenants. I know of a couple who rented out their house, and the family who moved in nailed their Christmas tree to the hardwood floors instead of using a tree stand. Expedient, I suppose, and admittedly these were particularly bad tenants, but no owner would be so short-sighted. Similarly, many investors are effectively short-term tenants, turning their portfolios so quickly they are really just renting the stocks that they temporarily “own.”

-Jeff Bezos about the ownership Leadership Principle (2003 letter to shareholders)

📃 #2 Role Guidelines

When I was onboarding as a new hire, I always wondered if I’d be progressing fast enough.

Setting expectations with your manager is important. But we can’t forget manager is just one opinion.

And what if I’m on good or bad terms with the manager? My day-to-day may be easier or harder, but it was a realization that I wouldn’t be promoted or fired just because of that.

Having a public criteria everyone can check is important. It affects everyone:

• People will know if they are meeting expectations in their current role

• People will know how can they perform at the next level

📍 #3 A single obsession

If I try to be rich, be healthy, be a great engineer, be a great person in all my relationships, be the best student… I may improve in those areas, but I won’t become the best.

But if I have a single focus that drives my actions for 20+ years, I’ll likely become the best in this single focus.

That’s the mindset Jeff puts into his companies. Amazon was going to be the most customer-obsessed company. And Blue Origin was going to be the most decisive company.

All other principles feed into the main one. It’s the pillar at the center of everything.

When there are opposing views, the right thing is to do the one that aligns the most with the single principle

“You make money when you sell things—why would you allow negative reviews on your website?” Speaking as a focus group of one, I know I’ve sometimes changed my mind before making purchases on Amazon.com as a result of negative or lukewarm customer reviews. Though negative reviews cost us some sales in the short term, helping customers make better purchase decisions ultimately pays off for the company.
- 2003 letter to shareholders

🔶 #4 Tenets

“Unless you know better ones”.

That’s the central piece of this concept. They are the principles you define for a system, organization, or program They are specific, detailed, and define how you operate. But they are not inflexible rules. If the rules of the game change, you adapt your tenets.

It’s a long-term strategy. You spend a lot of time thinking about them. They are not something to throw away on the first complication.

For example, a tenet of a service was not allowing any new synchronous call on it. Besides that rule, you provide the guidance that any new information your service needs should come from the existing downstream dependencies.

Career-wise, the tenets I find the most valuable are the Principal Engineer Community Tenets. I highly encourage you to give it a read later.
My favorite:

RESPECT WHAT CAME BEFORE

Principal Engineers are grateful to our predecessors. We appreciate the value of working systems and the lessons they embody. We understand that many problems are not essentially new.

🗓️ #5 Working backwards

a.k.a. “right to left planning” in the outside world.

The bigger the vision, the wider the gap between it and your present reality, and the more uncomfortable we feel.

But for any vision, we can think of the step just before achieving it. And the step just before that… Start to pull the thread and you’ll find the major milestones to achieve, all the way to the first step in each of them.

For the projects I work on, I create a calendar with the target launch date. From there, I start putting blocks of work working backward. Depending on how many blocks of work, we’ll need to parallelize them. This exercise brings clarity on how much people must work on a project to reach our dates.

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These are only 5 of a list of useful concepts I have learned at Amazon.

Subscribe below for a future article where I’ll cover:

• Jeff Bezos’ uncomfortable phone call during a meeting

• How to scale your thinking and not rely on good intentions from people.

• How to deal with company politics when a disagreement appears between teams.

• How to create an engineering culture of excellence.

• How to make fast decisions.

🗃️ Resources

• Amazon Leadership Principles

• Blue Origin Leadership Principles

• Letters to shareholders

• PE Community Tenets

• Book: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

• Book: Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

• Book: Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, with an Introduction by Walter Isaacson

• Book: The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon

👏 Weekly applause

These are some great articles I went through during the week

• This is why Amazon is unbeatable by

  Tech Books
  . A good overview of the experimentation mindset of Amazon.

• Run Meetings Like a Pro - Cheat Sheet by

  Techlead Mentor
  . A concise checklist for different meeting scenarios

• My learnings from the book "A Philosophy of Software Design" by

  Tech World With Milan Newsletter
  . The book itself has some good concepts to carry in your day to day, such as “deep modules, shallow interfaces“ and the archetype of the “tactical tornado” who makes things work without thinking in design. It’s a good book to create a checklist and have it handy.

• How Khan Academy Scaled to 30 Million Users by

  System Design Newsletter
  . When starting a project nobody starts with microservices directly. Focus on the problem to solve first, then later find the best tool for it. If you focus on the tool (e.g. using a complex microservice architecture), you’ll not pay attention to the real problem you have to solve (e.g. having CDN and session cache to reduce traffic that hits the application servers)

• Context-switching - one of the worst productivity killers in the engineering industry by

  Engineering Leadership
  and
  Crushing Tech Education
  . A rundown of techniques to avoid context-switching killing your productivity. We aren’t going to create a perfect environment without distractions, but we can change what’s in our control.

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