Setting audacious customer-focused goals at Amazon: a cautionary tale

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View profile for Brian Mount

Director, Software Dev - Amazon.com Purchase Experience

Failing the right customer-focused goal at Amazon is better than succeeding at the wrong one An engineering manager on my team once proposed an audacious goal "we will reduce server latency by 20%." We owned the navigation elements of the website shopping experience - rendered on every page so a 20% latency improvement would be huge! I was a new leader to the team and wanted to learn as much as possible, asking "How much of that 20% latency reduction will customers see?" "Customers should see about half the improvement." A 10% speed up for navigation elements for all pages at Amazon.com would be still be great! After discussion (we couldn't do more without resourcing trade-offs) I was onboard: "Great! Set the goal for a 10% customer improvement and get started!" Immediate push back. "Wait! We're only confident in the server side improvement - we might miss this goal!" They were afraid to commit even if it meant taking a server goal that might not matter to customers. This resistance meant we didn't take any latency goal and invested elsewhere. I've seen this pattern repeated since then - leaders preferring to commit to what they know they can deliver and being afraid to outline the goal impact in customer terms that would truly matter. In some cases this means the goal proposed was easily accomplished (we engineers can be a pessimistic lot). In some cases these less-inspiring goals were missed, or simply dropped. Either outcome isn't necessarily great, but missing a tightly defined goal that had unimpressive benefit reflects poorly on the judgment of a leader. Better to aim too high and miss (but get close!) than aim low and fail to impress or achieve. Within reason - teams and people will rise to higher expectations. I am guilty of over-optimism in setting goals, sometimes dramatically so. In 2021 I set a 1-year customer-obsessed goal based on "what would need to be true" hoping to inspire and exceed. We didn't make it - the goal was so audacious that I lost trust with the team "it's red from the start!" Our 2022 goal was more reasonable, but still audacious (yes - we missed that one too). We did ultimately succeed in June 2023, 18 months late -- but crucially I didn't lose the trust of my leaders along the way. We made measurable progress and I provided updates on where we were, the problems we faced, and (more importantly) how we continued to de-prioritize other goals to make the more important work happen. I learned to both educate and simplify in my updates so my leaders could understand, give helpful feedback, and support us when necessary. I helped them appreciate how hard the problems that were trying to solve were - not to excuse the misses, but to explain them. This helped me continue to have the privilege of leading my team. I was promoted in the midst of red goals - the most critical one across my org. Why? Because failing the right goal is better than succeeding on the wrong one.

Natalie White

Principal HCLS Solutions Architect | Technical Therapist | Builder | DevOps Cultural Transformation | Amazon Bar Raiser

2mo

I really needed to hear this! Thanks for the perspective!

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