Is It Day Two At Amazon?

With big company culture creeping in, a dozen Amazon employees tell me it’s starting to feel like the long-dreaded Day Two.

At Amazon, “It’s Always Day One” is more than a rallying cry. It’s an ethos. It means that no matter how big the company gets, it must continue to operate with the urgency and scrappiness of a startup.

“Day Oneness” at Amazon is seen as the key to fending off complacency and displacement. It’s why Amazon workers show up with a mad gleam in their eye, ready to turn bold ideas into reality on a shoestring budget and little sleep. Asked what Day Two looks like, Jeff Bezos once told employees it’s “Stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.” That, he said, is why it’s Always Day One.

But thirty years after Amazon’s actual Day One, Jeff Bezos is no longer CEO, and a dozen employees within its corporate offices tell me it’s starting to feel like Day Two.

Instead of the experimental, fast-moving Amazon I remember from my eleven years there, big company culture is starting to creep in, and even the CEO is calling it out. In a letter to employees, Bezos-replacement Andy Jassy recently listed off Amazon’s cultural ills, citing “pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings,” and other maddening bureaucratic habits the company long swore it would never adopt.

Amazon, still, remains on a strong trajectory. Jassy is a more measured and pragmatic CEO than Bezos and has guided Amazon’s quarterly operating profit to an all-time high, helping it achieve $2 trillion in market capitalization for the first time.

But being a Day One company isn’t just about external metrics. It’s about the energy people bring to work every day, a sense of curiosity and experimentation and, above all, obsessive focus on customer needs. These cultural qualities helped Amazon embed itself in every part of consumer life. And now, its employees see them slipping away.

Upgrade to paid

Scale

Almost everyone I spoke with said Amazon is simply too massive and distributed to sustain a shared culture. Around 2008, I attended a meeting where then-SVP of Retail Jeff Wilke warned us that in the not-too-distant future, “this ship is going to be too big to turn around fast.” Amazon had under 21,000 employees worldwide then, and operated with such dizzying speed that his words didn’t feel quite real. But as corporate headcount grew to around 150,000 over the next decade, I realized he’d been right. (He was almost always right.) I wouldn’t call it bloat. The work still outstripped our capacity. But bottlenecks appeared everywhere. A weekly design-review meeting I attended mushroomed from a tight seven stakeholders to more than 20, effectively derailing forward movement. My organization’s senior executives were so over-scheduled that getting them in a room together could take weeks of false starts and last-minute cancellations.

Since then, corporate headcount has ballooned to over 350,000 and some employees think Amazon has simply outgrown its time-honored ways of working. Several people specifically cited “document culture,” or Amazon’s tradition of centering meetings on dense, data-packed narratives. The first half of the meeting is devoted to silent reading, followed by discussion. I’m a big fan of document culture. It’s a brilliant way to ensure the presenting team has thought through every angle of the topic. It’s also very labor-intensive; a typical document can easily require a month or more of drafts, revisions, and multiple preliminary reviews.

And veterans now fear that Amazon prioritizes the process over the outcomes it is supposed to produce. “My team is really good at writing docs and tearing each other’s docs apart,” says one senior manager. “But nothing ever gets done.” In his 2016 shareholder letter, Bezos warned against “managing to proxies,” or letting processes become more important than the outcomes they were designed to produce. “It’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day Two,” he said.

“We’ve been trying to get in front of my director for four months, and the meeting keeps getting canceled the day before”

Other employees say that by the time their documents are reviewed, they’ve become irrelevant or obsolete. “We’ve been trying to get in front of my director for four months, and the meeting keeps getting canceled the day before,” one newer AWS employee told me. “He asked for this doc, but by now I’m not sure it will ever see the light of day.” This person, like several newcomers, seemed bewildered by the primacy of doc culture.

“I know it’s an Amazon thing,” he said. “But I don’t really get why. Neither does my boss. We’re just doing it because that’s how things are done.”

Several people even cited Amazon’s return-to-office (RTO) policies as a source of more distance between them and their co-workers, not less. “Andy said RTO was going to help us collaborate more,” said one. “But we have ‘agile seating’ now, so you don’t actually sit with your coworkers. Before I can have a conversation with a coworker, I have to figure out where they’re even located that day. It’s just so inefficient.”

Waning customer obsession

Both veterans and newbies fear that competitor parity now gets more attention than customer needs. ...

Subscribe to Big Technology to unlock the rest.

Become a paying subscriber of Big Technology to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.

A subscription gets you:

© 2024 Alex Kantrowitz
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
Unsubscribe