Think Like Amazon

Dave spent over 10 years at Amazon where he was a Technology Director prior to being asked to build the technology foundations for Bezos Academy.    In Part 1 of our conversation, Dave shares his experience and advice on how to develop leaders and accelerate their learning and career development. During his years at Amazon, Dave coached, mentored, and promoted many Amazon leaders and was also prom...

Colin spent 12 years on Amazon’s senior leadership team, including two years as “Chief of Staff” to Jeff Bezos. During this time, Colin had a front-row seat to the development and implementation of Amazon’s core operating principles and mechanisms, such as written memos, single-threaded teams, and the bar raiser program.    In early 2021, Colin, along with fellow ex-Amazon VP Bill Carr, released t...

John Olsen spent 7 years at Amazon as VP of Kindle Human Resources and VP of HR for Worldwide Operations. During these years of rapid global expansion for Amazon, John had to rely on proven principles and models to help ensure teams were making strong decisions, avoiding bias, and committed behind key goals. Since leaving Amazon in 2019, John has helped companies and boards learn to have backbone,...

Ethan Evans spent over 15 years at Amazon where he held multiple VP roles across Appstore, Twitch, and Amazon Gaming. During this time, Ethan led teams of over 800 people, launched Prime Video and Twitch Prime programs, and has been issued more than 60 patents. During Ethan’s time at Amazon, he helped craft part of the Ownership leadership principle and witnessed the S-team and countless teams dem...

Allon spent nearly 7 years at Amazon, holding senior roles across both Amazon’s e-commerce retail category businesses and as Director of Prime Now. During these roles, Allon refined his ability to dive deep into a business and understand its critical levers, a skill he first acquired as a management consultant and now applies post-Amazon as he leads portfolio operations in private equity.    In th...

Kim spent 12 years at Amazon where she managed various retail functions across Books, Grocery, Outdoors, and Tools categories, ultimately serving as director and category leader over a multi-billion-dollar business. Over the years, Kim relied on a customer-first approach to quickly navigate new role transitions and grow successful category businesses. Kim now exercises her customer obsession as Ch...

Skyler spent 8 years at Amazon in retail and data engineering leadership roles, including forming a team within Amazon Hardlines to identify and drive process improvements at scale to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in cost savings. Key to succeeding in these nascent and disruptive projects were the lessons Skyler learned that helped his team follow the Vocally Self-critical leadership pri...

Maju spent 8 years as Vice President for Amazon’s global logistics and fulfillment technology organizations. During his Amazon career, the scope of Maju’s role grew to oversee thousands of engineering, operations, and business employees across the globe. Earlier this year, Maju made the transition from Amazon to become CTO at Bolt, a startup that offers online one-click checkout technology to reta...

Nick spent over 5 years at Amazon where he co-founded Amazon Game Studios and led teams to grow Amazon’s partnerships with game developers. During this time, Nick also became an Amazon Bar Raiser, interviewing over 350 Amazon candidates and mentoring multiple bar raisers in training before leaving Amazon to educate job candidates and enterprise clients on Amazon’s hiring process through his compan...

Andrea spent 10 years at Amazon where she led over 15 product categories, helped launch Amazon’s automated pricing system, and ran Amazon Prime for Amazon Canada. During this time, Andrea made and oversaw many decisions where speed was critical to grow nascent programs and delight customers. Since leaving Amazon in 2015, Andrea has consulted hundreds of manufacturers and helped grow an agency busi...

Dave Glick spent 20 years at Amazon as a VP responsible for building much of Amazon’s pricing, warehouse management systems, and fulfillment technology. As an early executive at Amazon, Dave played a major role in Amazon’s adoption of tenets and in how the Are Right, A Lot principle is practices at the company. In this episode, Dave shares the stories behind Amazon’s use of tenets and the focus on...

Stefan Haney is a 15-year Amazon veteran, where he led multiple product, data, and technical teams during formative years of the Amazon marketplace. In addition to participating in countless narrative document reviews with Amazon’s senior leadership team, Stefan brings experience as a former instructor of Amazon’s internal writing class. In this episode, Stefan shares why writing has become a crit...

Alejandro Bethlen spent 8 years at Amazon, first as a general manager for multiple Amazon US Retail teams and then in key executive and program roles in Amazon EU. In our interview, Alejandro expounds on Amazon’s approach to separable, single-threaded leadership and shares examples of how it sped up decision making for organizations. Alejandro pulls back the curtain to share how maintaining a sing...

Justin Maner spent 10 years at Amazon where he was involved in quickly scaling several category teams before leading the turnaround of Amazon’s Baby Registry and managing innovation-centered teams as a director for Amazon Devices. In this interview, Justin dives into the Think Big principle and illustrates how he applied it to accelerate building for the Tools marketplace, develop a novel approach...

Eugene Choi spent 7 years at Amazon as Finance Director for Retail Softlines and AWS Infrastructure prior to joining the executive teams of Oberto Snacks and Viacom CBS. In this episode, Eugene breaks down how he learned Amazon's input-focused process to uncover business opportunities and deliver results. Eugene shares how leaders can help both free up their teams and better serve customers b...

Welcome to the podcast where you'll get special access to learn from Amazon executives as they share how to apply Amazon's best principles and processes to grow your own business. Listen as Amazon's strategies, frameworks, and mechanisms are broken down through the personal experiences of senior Amazon leaders so that they can be replicated and applied in your work as manager, leade...