This is the new year, and who will you delight?

The most important question we ask in Amazon - which is usually in the format of Presse Release/Frequently Asked Question (PR/FAQ https://lnkd.in/gKZc44Ms) - is: “Who will you delight?” I often tell my team members if there is one thing they can take away from Amazon when they leave the company, this will be the one: Always ask yourself, “Who will I delight if I do X?” That “who” must be a concrete person. It cannot be a general term like “Amazon’s Customers”. Who are the Amazon’s customers anyway? Are they your parents, your kids, or your neighbors? Pick a name, and use that name as the persona of the “who”. This might sound silly but gradually I learned it is the most critical part of Amazon’s “start from customers and work backwards” approach. It is easy to claim “I love human” but it is a lot harder to say “I love my neighbors.”, because to love a concrete person you need to do some concrete things. The same mentality applies here. Once we start to personalize the “who” we will delight - let’s call it John - we have to be very specific how John will be delighted and why he will be delighted by X instead of Y. It is not easy to nail down the specifics but that is also why we invest the time on working backwards. “[I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection.” Jeff Bezos said it well for retail business, it might also be used as a general guideline for delighting customers of all trades: cheaper, faster and more choices. Now John does not have to be an external customer. A lot of time we deliver features to make our engineers’ life easier and happier - like removing an Oncall rotation. A happy engineer is more likely to be productive than the unhappy ones. So we say in the PR/FAQ: John, a KMS oncall engineer, said: “I am so glad my oncall time is reduced by 50%, 7 weeks a year! Now I have more time to code features for customers and grow my career, instead of handling repetitive operational tickets.” By quoting concrete person we plan to delight, we are applying empathy - “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”; we also project ourselves into the future and think as detailed as we can, what that future is like: is it what customers really want? is it worth doing? Is there other things we can do to delight customers even more instead? A worthy future becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. One of the candidates I interviewed recently told me a tool he developed to allow senior executives to plan for their hiring headcount across roles and levels. “Really? Did you talk to any senior executives about how they liked your tool?” I asked. “I didn’t. They are busy people.” “Not even one? Have they actually used your tool?” “I am not sure…” Well, certainly the candidate didn’t find who he wanted to delight. This is 2023, who will you delight?AWS re:In