How to be big and nimble as you scale your company
You wanna be big and nimble. I find that there are a lot of things that are protective of the day one mentality. I already spent some time on one of them, which is customer obsession. I think that’s the most important thing, and it gets harder as you get bigger. ⠀
When you’re a little tiny company, figure 10 person startup company, every single person in the company is focused on the customer. When you get to be a bigger company, you got all the middle managers and you’ve got all these layers. Those people aren’t on the front lines, they’re not interacting with customers every day. They’re insulated from customers, and they start to manage, not the customer happiness directly, but they start to manage though proxies like metrics and processes and some of those things can become bureaucratic. ⠀
It’s very challenging, but one of the things that happens, is the decision making velocity slows down. I think one of the reasons that that happens, is that people, the junior executives inside the big company start to model all decisions as if they’re heavyweight, irreversible, highly consequential decisions. Even two-way doors, you could make a decision, it’s the wrong decision you can just back through the door and try again. Even those reversible decisions start to be made with heavyweight processes. You can teach people that these pitfalls and traps, and then teach them to avoid those traps. That’s what we’re trying to do at Amazon so that we can maintain our inventiveness and our hearts and our kind of small company spirit, even as we have the scale and scope of a larger company⠀
– Jeff Bezos