Elements of Amazon’s Day 1 Culture

Contrast this to a “Day 2” mentality: as a company grows over time, it needs to adjust its approach to effectively manage the organization as it scales. The danger is that as this happens, decision making can slow down, and the company can become less agile, moving further and further away from the customer as it rotates focus towards internal challenges rather than external customer-centric innovation.

This doesn’t happen overnight; it can creep in gradually, and manifest in small ways which on their own are not immediately alarming, or even readily apparent. If left unchecked, a Day 2 mentality can manifest. When asked “What does Day 2 look like?” Bezos, in his 2016 Shareholder Letter, answered: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” To avoid Day 2 culture, a company must be hyper-vigilant, remained focused on its customers, and stave off practices that hamper its ability to rapidly innovate.

While we do not believe Amazon’s approach is the only or best one, many of our customers ask us to share the lessons we’ve learned as we’ve grown, as well as some of the mechanisms we employ to ensure that it’s always Day 1 at Amazon.

There are many aspects of maintaining an agile, Day 1 start-up mentality. For us, the most important one—the bedrock upon which Amazon’s culture rests—is customer obsession.

Amazon has 16 Leadership Principles that we use to guide our actions and the decisions we make every day. While there is no official order or hierarchy to them, it is also no coincidence that the first Leadership Principle is Customer Obsession. “Leaders start with the customer and work backwards,” it states. “They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.”

We start with the customer and work backwards from their needs. By digging into their experiences and frustrations and deeply understanding the context behind them, we avoid inventing in isolation, or producing a solution in search of a customer. “One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent,” Bezos wrote in his 2017 Letter to Shareholders. “Yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary.’ ” Customers can provide endless ideas and inspiration to innovate, and their needs and desires will drive you to invent on their behalf.

As an example, at AWS, around 90% of the features developed come directly from hearing about what our customers need. The other 10% comes from being close enough to customers that we can invent on their behalf when they don’t, or can’t, articulate those needs.

This relentless customer obsession has been a central part of Amazon’s approach since the company’s literal Day 1 (one of the early names Bezos considered for the company was Relentless.com—type that into your browser and see where it takes you!). By maintaining a customer-obsessed culture and working backwards from your customers’ needs, your innovations are better set up for success right from the start. Being inspired by your customer’s needs is also likely to open yourself up to innovate in many more areas than you may have otherwise. Your innovations are not constrained by how you can accomplish them in your current environment, but rather by how big they can be and how much they can delight your customers.

We live in a world of constant, unabated change driven by rapid technological innovation, shifting regulation and governance demands, and even unplanned external upheavals like COVID-19. It is more crucial than ever that companies resist simply falling back on their safe and known competencies at the expense of meeting changing customer needs.

A company prone to Day 2 thinking may find itself more internally-focused on maximizing current margins and profitability instead of paying attention to current trends and boldly innovating on behalf of new or underserved customers. A company with a Day 1 mentality will insist upon constant iteration and experimentation. They will foster curiosity. They will embrace, explore, and be inspired by external trends all around them. And they will empower their leaders and employees to take risks, being permissive of failure as an inevitable consequence of innovation.

This is not easy. It requires executives to bravely set the example from the top, creating the right culture and environment to nurture experimentation and be accepting of failure. As Bezos wrote in his 2016 Letter to Shareholders, “Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight.”

It also requires you to stay close to the customer, and not let process get in the way of delivering customer-focused outcomes. In companies that have experienced growth, the tendency is to build processes to help manage a business at scale and beyond line of sight. While good processes can be highly efficient and effective, companies need to be heedful of the Day 2 tendency of optimizing the process rather than ensuring it is still driving the right results for customers.

An example comes from the use of aggregate data. Reporting may show steady average growth across a large business, but the very aggregate nature of the data may mask underlying trends and drivers that affect a meaningful number of customers. For example, a customer anecdote in the form of feedback or a use case arising in a trouble ticket may seem like an outlier given its opposition to what the data shows. In these cases, it pays to dive deep into those outliers and anecdotes, and ensure that employees are escalating issues quickly and root causes are corrected before they impact your customers at scale.

It is not easy for a company to experience growth and stay innovative. The very nature of growth and operating a business at scale breeds additional complexity, and with it, a natural tendency to slow down. It is critical for the business to adapt quickly to rapidly changing external environments and to the ever-evolving needs of their customers by innovating on their behalf.

To do so, a company needs to zealously guard against Day 2 mentalities: focusing on short term goals or process instead of customer-delighting outcomes; allowing hierarchy and bureaucracy to spread rather than empowering autonomy and rapid experimentation and decision-making; fearing failure and entrenching around existing capabilities rather than thinking big about what can be.

By retaining a Day 1 culture—one that is customer-obsessed, that enables high-quality and high-velocity decision-making, and that empowers employees and leaders alike to stay curious, be experimental, and permit failure and the learning that comes with it as a competitive advantage rather than a risk to avoid at all costs—a company is better able to leverage its growth rather than be slowed down by it. And is better suited to lead innovation at the forefront.

As Bezos wrote in his 2016 Letter to Shareholders: