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What's it like to get a “?” email from Jeff Bezos? [video]

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Re: What's it like to get a “?” email from Jeff Bezos? [video]

#51

Post by simonebrunozzi »

Ah, the "myth" of Jeff Bezos. I only "met" him twice, in the hallways of PacMed, back when Amazon's workforce was so tiny compared to now.

I was at AWS, 2008-2014. In the early days, Bezos would frequently comment on AWS-related stuff, such as daily EC2 revenues, etc.

Occasionally, despite I wasn't an executive back then, I would also be one of the tens of email recipients that angry Amazon customers would use to shout their anger at the company (because my public facing role of tech evangelist, and my @simon Twitter handle).

I have to say, I don't think that Amazon's and Jeff's success has much to do with a "?" email, or the ":)" email I saw a few times. These are simply a shortcut for slightly longer sentences - "what do you say about this?", and "Nice work! :)".

Jeff's success, in my view, is an amazing capacity to hire excellent people, and being able to drive them to work crazy hours and feel like founders, despite not having share ownership in accordance to their work. Most of them, especially the early ones, are rich beyond any imagination. They could have been richer, sure... But they could also not.

Also, the organizational structure at Amazon, with every team having to provide APIs for their product, is also genius. AWS could have not happened without that.

Re: What's it like to get a “?” email from Jeff Bezos? [video]

#52

Post by Traster »

This sort of ridiculous time pressure on a question that's basically of almost no importance seems unnecessary. It makes me think the culture around this is completely broken. It's also notable that they dropped everything, panicked, and triaged for 48 hours (which I presume is his way of saying that he has no respect for any of his teams' personal lives) for something which has no urgency other than who is asking the question. Then having completely interrupted everyone's jobs for 48 hours, they then go on to completely refocus the team for 2 weeks looking at why Barnes & Noble must be cheating.

And how does it all resolve? Oh right, the B&N App is pretty good, and they ask their users for reviews. Which the Kindle team would know if any of them had bothered to pay attention to what their competition is doing in the first place. Notice how the original point was that the B&N App had more better reviews? And how the solution was not to build a better Kindle App - it was to juice the metrics.

Re: What's it like to get a “?” email from Jeff Bezos? [video]

#54

Post by quicklime »

stepstop wrote: post #18
sheeshkebab wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a passive aggressive and unprofessional - you don’t want your employees talking to each other this way, so don’t start it either.

Is it though? He only has one side of the story so the (?) is asking for the other side of the story (which they might not be aware of). How do you do it as a CEO?

Yes, it is. I’m sure Jeff understands exactly how these emails make people feel.

If he’s just innocently asking for the other side of the story, he should put together a complete sentence that demonstrates that, rather than sending a single ambiguous character that he knows could be interpreted as “you fucked up, fix this right now or you’re fired!”

Re: What's it like to get a “?” email from Jeff Bezos? [video]

#55

Post by Traster »

par wrote: post #39

I still can't downvote on HN but if I could, i'd downvote this.

Why? It's interesting, you should upvote it.

I mean, obviously what he's telling us is that they've got a stupid broken culture and their intuition about their product is hilariously wrong, but it's still an interesting insight.

Re: What's it like to get a “?” email from Jeff Bezos? [video]

#56

Post by colinplamondon »

At this point in the App Store cycle, most app developers I know would aggressively "review flush". It sounds like the OP wasn't familiar with the growth strategies common at the time.

If your star average goes below 4.5, put out a quickie point release. That would reset the reviews, and the review prompt would drive a 5 star instantly.

IIRC, I'd also divide all the users into buckets, and stage out review prompts by week. You never want negative reviews stacked alongside each other in the review list. Multiple negative reviews is the kiss of death for conversion - rank drop could happen fast.

By staggering review prompts, you'd get positive reviews rolling in every single week, with a surge up front.

Obviously, that doesn't mean _ignore_ the negative reviews. Those are generally critical product failures. That necessitates response. We'd group and measure review categories, and reach out to affected users to see how they felt about potential and shipped solutions. Product quality is step one on good reviews.

None of that means setting your business on fire because of negative reviews. At the same time it's a critical signal to be dealt with, there's an immediate business problem of minimizing or eliminating the impact of negative reviews.

They're two different swim lanes requiring two different processes.

Re: What's it like to get a “?” email from Jeff Bezos? [video]

#57

Post by happytoexplain »

jasonv wrote: post #13
doopy-loopy2 wrote: post #3

Whenever I get passive aggressive or otherwise ambiguous emails like that I just ignore it. If it's important, they'll follow up.

I think in this case, the "From:" is the "it's important" part and the "?" is the "What's up with this?" part. I've been a CEO and CTO, but usually in I think among all his possible sins, at Amazon scale, "?" itself wouldn't rank super high.

Surely one can comment on an example of communication even if the person it came from should be morally judged only on their great sins? It's inherently valuable to talk about examples of communication, especially from a leadership angle - and so conversely this conversation is not exclusively a judgement of a famous person.

Re: What's it like to get a “?” email from Jeff Bezos? [video]

#58

Post by colinplamondon »

dpbriggs wrote: post #42
abetlen wrote: post #23

I think it's telling that his first hypothesis for why Barnes & Noble was getting more positive reviews was that they were paying for them. Honestly, my first thought was "maybe they're just asking more customers". I wonder if he thought that the competitor was doing something shady because he'd been put on the spot and so his first response was instinctively the most defensive one.

He mentioned several times that asking for reviews wasn't common (in his opinion) at the time, and so there's little else that could reasonably explain the jump in review count.

Engineer pushback on this was MASSIVE in 2010-2012. There was still a Wild West ethos, so it cost a lot of goodwill to ship the feature. We did it anyways - it was the obvious right thing for the business. Getting there was one of the most heated feature debates I've encountered.

Re: What's it like to get a “?” email from Jeff Bezos? [video]

#59

Post by devit »

BrandonWatson wrote: post #5
doopy-loopy2 wrote: post #3

Whenever I get passive aggressive or otherwise ambiguous emails like that I just ignore it. If it's important, they'll follow up.

Yeah, I'm wish it were that simple with the Bezos emails. :)

Does he have a reminder setup or human assistant to check for answers to the "?" mails?

Someone who can't be bothered to type more than "?" might not bother to check for an answer either.

Re: What's it like to get a “?” email from Jeff Bezos? [video]

#60

Post by tinman25 »

Ironic that this is about reviews of a product on an app store given Amazons legacy on product reviews...

Brandon here gives a great overview of his experience here. but I'm sorry that so many intelligent people have to be bootlickers to CEO whims and that we inculcate that lesson for our new hires and new engineers. (ie the CEO is 'GOD')

Of course a CEO gets to dictate policy..but if it happens on a whim or for certain empathy deficient folks like Bezos after another CEO eggs him on..

To me a decent work life balance is paramount..but ambitious people have other priorities -Life's to short to waste your weekend analyzing app store review data esp if you or your team of engineers is busy doing what the company wants in the first place.

Bezos, Musk, Jobs, Gates or our own CEO we drink the corporate kool-aid and keep worshiping these guys.. at what cost?

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