I ran Kindle software Product Management for 3 years. Left in 2014 AMA about the memo process or OP1/OP2 process.
Did you ever feel like it was a waste of time or do you feel it genuinely added value to the company to engage in that exercise
Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
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Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#42I ran Kindle software Product Management for 3 years. Left in 2014 AMA about the memo process or OP1/OP2 process.
Did you ever feel like it was a waste of time or do you feel it genuinely added value to the company to engage in that exercise?
Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#43I ran Kindle software Product Management for 3 years. Left in 2014 AMA about the memo process or OP1/OP2 process.
Did you ever feel like it was a waste of time or do you feel it genuinely added value to the company to engage in that exercise?
Sorry for the double post, accidentally hit reply twice on mobile client.
Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is also the story of Amazon mandating that all internal systems communicate with each other through APIs. I think leadership at Amazon has good technical knowledge so they can develop these strategies and see them through. In my company nobody with a "C*O" title (including CIO and CTO) has any clue about tech so they are very susceptible to snake oil salesmen telling them things like "we must do ML". So they te…
How can someone become a CTO without having any clue about tech?
I have worked with a lot of CTOs or similar. Sometimes CTO is a title that can approve large budgets and an effective CTO is actually their direct report.
Being a CTO is less about technology and more about understanding the global technical landscape, accounting and legal implications to large budget decision making. If I, for example, choose Microsoft as a vendor will that impact our Pacific market and if so what is the cost benefit? These are not trivial choices. To an extent a lot of the job is risk mitigation, reducing liability for the company.
A good analogy would be a CEO of a shipping company not knowing how to sail. They will know costs of the voyage, costs associated with the voyage, etc. but not the day to day of how a ship operates. And they don’t need to. If anyone has worked with a micromanager they’d appreciate this.
Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
They need a 6-pager czar who has the power to send back to editing any paper that's not readable enough.
That just pushes the problem one level down on the stack, no? Or who sends back the work of the 6-pager Czar? IMO they need to refresh the process, and refresh it frequently. I don't see them doing that though. Similar things have happened with the well-intentioned "bar-raiser" process as well IMO. I had bar-raisers in interview loops for my team who seemed more intent in blocking potential competitors to their niche…
No, distributed responsibility is qualitatively different from a single responsible party.
Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was curious how the Amazon/eBay split looks revenue-wise.... Not exactly apples-to-apples but in 2018 Amazon was $180B in net sales vs eBay $95B GMV. So Amazon is more than double but maybe not 10x? Amazon GMV is supposedly in the $250B range but they don't report it. And it's obviously hard to compare such different business models.
Not exactly apples-to-apples but in 2018 Amazon was $180B in net sales vs eBay $95B GMV. So you're comparing Amazon sales to eBay market value (total stock price). Yeah, it's completely meaningless comparison [Edit: I was wrong, it's Amazon sales versus eBay's gross merchandise value but it's still entirely off as a comparison]. Btw, my quickly googled references show eBay's net sales as 10.75B and Amazon's at $141.9…
My concern with the net sales comparison is that I think for eBay that only includes their fee, not the actual retail price of the goods, whereas for Amazon it is the entire price of goods sold. That to me seemed a much more apples-to-oranges comparison which is why I didn't cite it. I have no idea what's actually true. I would be interested if someone wanted to sort out the truth there but I hit my limit for how much more research I want to do.
Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can someone become a CTO without having any clue about tech?
Or a security chief without any clue about tech (let alone security): https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/09/15/1910200/equifax-ceo-h...
It's still relatively common for people in IT in general and security specifically to have no formal background in it, so citing what someone did ages ago in university isn't all that convincing to establish lack of "clue about tech".
Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#48I thought Amazon's empire rests on AWS which actually funds the company allowing them to make a sustained loss on their retail business despite attempts to automate with robotics and ML.
AWS is now pushing Alexa for Business, which I assume is a corporate wide AI product along similar lines as IBM's Watson.
Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#49> AMAZON’S SIX-PAGE memos are famous. Executives must write one every year, laying out their business plan. Less well known is that these missives must always answer one question in particular: how are you planning to use machine learning? Responses like “not much” are, according to Amazon managers, discouraged. I think company culture & talent make a big difference here. At most companies this would run the risk of…
There is also the story of Amazon mandating that all internal systems communicate with each other through APIs. I think leadership at Amazon has good technical knowledge so they can develop these strategies and see them through. In my company nobody with a "C*O" title (including CIO and CTO) has any clue about tech so they are very susceptible to snake oil salesmen telling them things like "we must do ML". So they te…
Interesting thought, thanks for sharing
Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#50I ran Kindle software Product Management for 3 years. Left in 2014 AMA about the memo process or OP1/OP2 process.
IANAL but you should be careful about sharing private information about a large publicly traded company