On being bold

In July, I moved forward from my startup, four years in the making, for my next adventure. The team is in great hands and will sail forward with the Amazon mother-ship.

Before taking off, I wrote this piece to the new leader, on building and growing zero-to-one. I am sharing it along with so many builders creating the future.

[Our product] is one of the few places in Amazon that allows us to be bold. In contrast to a V2 product, inventing net-new experiences involves anticipating what really delights the customers not just what they tell us (faster horses vs. car). These delights require some deviation from a utility-driven design philosophy and data-rich decision model, which is not easy to navigate. It also means leaders' instinct and equally strong conviction matters so much.

Lessons from Fire Phone's flop inspired our decision to not try to be everything. [Our product]'s magic lies in enabling [scrubbed for confidentiality] and doing that really well. [Our product]doesn't need to be perfect, and it wins by being original. We do need to do it right by [our customer], even at the detriment of business metrics - it's a choice to be kind and it's about long term.

A common trap in product development is teams for various reason fall for "decision by committee", which leads to safer bets backed by tons of data but dull products in the end. It would be really interesting to connect with [two leaders]. They have good lessons to share on balancing creativity/intuition vs. data/predictability for experience-driven products.

Gen-I products like ours thrive when it's a playful place to work. For Jeff (our investor), [our product] is an investment and an experiment of [scrubbed for confidentiality], and we should treat it like an experiment ourselves so that we feel encouraged to take risks. Two key factors are in play:

(1) how the team defines success. The worse case scenario is that the product didn’t sell hundreds of thousands of units (assume we have done it right by our customers which is our baseline), but Amazon and the team would learn so much about building for the future.

(2) how inclusive the leadership is structured. For [our product], having [balanced representation of our customers' perspective] on the core leadership team (and the rest of the team) enhances the empathy we seek to establish with our customer.

*Confidential information has been scrubbed