Elements of Amazon’s Day 1 Culture

Written By Aamenah Ahmed

What is it?

  • Amazon’s “Day 1” is a mindset that employees should approach their work with and build the work environment with.

What does it include?

The “Day 1” mindset includes:

o   Having long-term focus

o   Being obsessed with customers and what they need

o   Using creativity to come up with new ideas to meet customer needs

CUSTOMER FOCUS

  • The mission of “Day 1” mindset is to always keep the customer at the center of everything Amazon does.

  • This is done by understanding the customer, what do they need, what are their challenges, and what solutions Amazon can provide.

  • The focus on customer means to be curious, quick and considerate, and experimental. This requires bravery to try things, fail, and apply lessons learnt to improve the solution.

What is “Day 2”?

  • “Day 2” mentality means as the company grows and employees continue their work, decision making can slow down, can become less responsive to change, and become less focused on customers.

  • This happens slowly and the importance is to avoid the “Day 2” mentality.

How to Maintain Day 1 Mentality?

  • Keeping teams small, less than 10, to focus on a single service.

  • Giving these small teams independence and the right resources to make, test, try out, and launch solutions.

  • Using 70% of data and information to start planning, if you wait for 90% then this slows down the opportunity to act, learn, and keep improving.

  • Focusing on current trends and how customer needs are changing in the present time, this helps with always having new solutions and products to offer.

Aamenah Ahmed
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Amazon’s Leadership Principles