2010 – Technology is fundamental to evolving & improving

I have always been intrigued by the letters sent to shareholders by both Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos. They are inspiring and, for wannabes like yours truly, a source of motivation and hope. So I am creating a series of articles on what learnings I took away from the letters of Jeff Bezos. This is the fourteenth letter in the series.

You can check out the complete series here: https://alphonserajdavid.com/category/book-reviews/non-fiction/jeff-bezos-stakeholder-letters/

Learning #1: R&D is the bread and butter of a sustainable product organization

Jeff starts of the letter with a array of now recognizable algorithms. He uses it to drive home the fact that the exceptional and ever improving customer experience at Amazon is the result of complex machine learning algorithms.

For the scale Amazon is trying to solve, most solutions are theoretical or not invented yet. It takes a team of highly motivated, obsessive experts to solve these problems. The so called “missionaries”

Learning #2: Solve Internal problems. it will create your future products

For example, Amazon’s needs couldn’t be solved by any commercial product in the market at that point. They needed a system to manage pentabytes of data and millions if not billions of requests. The now ubiquitous Amazon web services or AWS for short was created out of that need.

Learning #3: Customer needs will put you out of your comfort zone

Syncing across devices for Kindle was a customer need. But it was a complex solution with no direct revenue impact. But the obsession towards creating superior customer experiences meant they went ahead and created “Whispersync”

Learning #4: . Technology should be infused into all teams, processes, and decision-making

Technology R&D is not a siloed process to be handled by a specialized team. A core understand of technology and an ethos of constant process improvement and innovation using tech should permeate through the entire firm. This is done through making sure the teams are trained in data led decision making, have a clear broad idea of what tech can do and most importantly have a culture which nutures innovation.

In the end, good technology is indistinguishable from magic. All good technology when applied right will create free cashflow. Free cash flow creates improved returns for stakeholders.