How I went from Amazon, to Google, back to Amazon, Part 2
Thoughts on boomeranging back to Amazon after working at Google. → Part 1 | Part 3 ←
I recently boomeranged back to Amazon after 4 years at Google. Prior to my time at Google, I had spent 11+ years at Amazon. This is a collection of mini-articles I posted on LinkedIn as I encountered different things that got my attention. Just to be silly, I coined the hashtag a2g2a. Follow me on LinkedIn for more!
a2g2a: “Users” vs. “Customers”
…and why the word a company uses matters immensely
Amazonians have a visceral reaction to the word User. You’re not an Amazon “user,” you’re an Amazon Customer. This is true whether you’re using the Amazon Store, AWS, Prime Video, Prime Music, Alexa, Kindle, Audible, Fresh, etc. It’s true whether you’re a paying customer or not. This was imprinted onto my amazon reptilian brain over the course of the last 15 years by generations of long-time amazonians around me that consistently, patiently and stubbornly corrected me and lectured me on why the choice of word matters to set a culture.
Jack Dorsey, founder of both Twitter and Square, had a brilliant blog about the difference between those two words. It’s an old post (11 yrs ago), but he’s much more articulate than me, so I’ll quote him directly: “The entire technology industry uses the word User to describe its Customers. While it might be convenient, Users is a rather passive and abstract word. No one wants to be thought of as a User. I certainly don’t. And I wouldn’t consider my mom a User either, she’s my mom. The word User abstracts the actual individual. This may seem like a small and insignificant detail that doesn’t matter, but the vernacular and words we use set a very strong and subtle tone for everything we do. So let’s now part ways with our industry and rethink this. The word Customer is a much more active and bolder word. It’s honest and direct. It immediately suggests a relationship we must deliver on.”
During my 4 years at Google, I consistently heard the word User, whether that was Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Docs, Google Cloud, etc. That always triggered my amazonian reptilian brain’s visceral reaction. Eventually I wrote a little internal doc on why the choice of words mattered, and in a desperate effort to shift culture, I shared it with every single googler that uttered or wrote the word User anywhere near me. I’m certain some people just found me obnoxious, but others listened and got it, which made me happy.
But it felt like I was playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Even within my own org, we sent internal announcements about things we had added to our developer tools, and the email would say “The user can do XYZ”. No, no, no. First of all, it’s Customer, not User. Secondly, please don’t use the third person! You’re writing to another human being, use the second person. “You can now do XYZ!”
The googlers I interacted with during my 4 years at Google DID care about their customers — very much. I even partnered with a User Experience Researcher that was amazing. But the culture itself and the DNA of the company lacked the systemic mechanisms to codify that, channel it and reward it. Amazon codified it in its very first and foremost Leadership Principle (“Customer Obsession”) — and then in little details like the word Customer instead of User.
a2g2a: The way Amazon thinks about its Principal Engineers
…is unique — and I love it!
“I always thought of you (and my other Principal Engineers) as Amazon employees that were on loan to me.”
Yesterday I was catching up with my good friend and ex-manager Dan Sommerfield. Dan promoted me to Principal Engineer back in 2014 and was my manager for a number of years. As we were laughing about some of our shared past, Dan said that and it stuck with me.
A few weeks ago I posted in my a2g2a series about Swimming Lanes. I’ve also posted in the past about the Amazon Principal Engineering community (see links to both of those in my comments). Today’s reflections combine those.
Amazon Principal Engineers tend to have a healthy disregard for organizational and role boundaries. And Amazon’s DNA gives them the freedom to do so. At these big faang companies, for better or for worse, most orgs tend to optimize for themselves. It makes sense in terms of business needs: they need to move fast and expand their business. But this is often how we end up with duplicative work siloed usually at Director level. I’ve seen, time and time again: Principal Engineers look across organizations and connect dots that others don’t. The Amazon Principal Engineering community is a giant organic mesh. It worked incredibly well as a big mesh when I became a PE in 2014 and we were about 250 PEs in the entire company, but I’m continuously amazed that it still works in 2024 at today’s scale. This is a testament to the culture that some of our founding figures set decades ago- and our Distinguished Engineers continue to carry the torch today.
It’s not that this doesn’t happen in other companies; it did happen at Google and Microsoft too. But it’s so intrinsically embedded in the DNA of an Amazon Principal Engineer that it’s a lot more natural and expected here than anywhere else where I’ve worked or considered working.
a2g2a: A Tale of Two Leaders
aka Great Leaders Lead by Example
Amazon’s wording on the Leadership Principle of Earn Trust is “Leaders do not believe their body odor smells of perfume.”
[Note: some information obfuscated — the point of this post is not to point fingers at specific people but to use their behavior as examples of things that matter to me.]
Leader L1 was a Director, taking a group of 6 or 7 of us from Seattle to Sydney for a week. Amazon is a Frugal company so we always fly Economy. Not excited by the prospect of a 12-hr flight in a tiny cramped seat, I asked L1 if we could fly Premium Economy. We couldn’t. We were all on the same flight, and I figured since L1 was three levels above me, L1 was not going to be sitting in cattle-class with the rest of us. But when we boarded the plane, there was L1, sitting next to me! When we got to Sydney, we ended up having to squeeze 5 days of work into 4 days, so we pulled 14-hr days to make it work. It was intense and exhausting, but L1 was the first person in the room and the last person out of the room, every day.
Throughout this entire experience, L1 Earned Trust from me. A lot of it. L1 was not afraid to roll up their sleeves and do exactly what they were asking their people to do. L1 asked me to fly in a crappy seat, but they did it too. L1 asked me to work 14-hr days, but they did it too. To this date, if L1 asked me to jump, I would ask how high.
Leader L2 was also a Director. I had organized a group of 6 or 7 of us to go abroad. We had been working hard for weeks preparing for this trip. L2 decided to tag along. Then, travel restrictions came down hard, so L2 told us to cancel all travel. I had been looking forward to meeting f2f with close co-workers that I had only seen on video, so this was heart-breaking and demoralizing. But I figured, oh well, we’re ALL asked to make this sacrifice.
When something sucks, it sucks a little less if you know everybody else around you also has to do it too — facing adversity together creates camaraderie.
A couple of days later, I was chatting with L2 and L2 casually mentioned, “Oh, I’m still going.”
Wait, what?
I don’t have a great poker face so I’m sure for a split second L2 saw how appalled I was. That day, I lost a huge amount of trust and respect for L2 — and never regained it. L2 had asked their entire team to make a sacrifice, but they were unwilling to make it themselves. This is not how great leaders lead or Earn Trust.
These two tales are, of course, specific individuals, who do not necessarily reflect the entirety of a corporation of hundreds of thousands. Your experience may vary. But it always goes back to the DNA of the company and what values have been baked and how. As long-tenured executives of each company I expected both L1 and L2 to exemplify the behaviors I should be emulating. This is how culture passes from generation to generation.
a2g2a: What each company taught me
Different companies have taught me different things
[1]
Microsoft taught me how to be a Software Engineer in the industry (ok so this is technically a m2a2g2a post…). I started there in the nineties and spent 11 years. I learned how to write production-worthy code professionally, how to test it to ensure it could safely go out to millions of users, and how to work in large organizations.
[2]
Amazon taught me how to be a Leader. By the time I got to Amazon in 2009, Microsoft had shaped me as a Software Engineer, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to lead, particularly without authority. As Amazon doubled in size every year, I found myself in a position where I had to scale and I was surrounded by endless opportunities to step up to the plate. I also had consistently amazing managers, mentors and role models that taught me how to be amazonian.
[3]
Google taught me about myself, the things that truly matter to me, and how I get fulfillment in my professional life. There’s a lot I liked about Google, and there’s a lot I learned at Google, but I eventually realized the culture was not allowing me to be my Best Self. This is what the hashtag#a2g2a series has been about. There were things I didn’t even know mattered to me, because I had always taken them for granted at Amazon, until I no longer had them.
Please note my series is NOT a generalization: your mileage may vary and Google may be your dream place; it just wasn’t mine because of how my brain works and the leadership training I received at Amazon. Nevertheless, the 4 years I spent at Google were critical in helping me grow and who I am today. But Amazon is most definitely Home.
Little by little, I’ll continue peeling the layers of the onion in this a2g2a series!
