We’re working on it.)īut much of what we do with machine learning happens beneath the surface. (We still struggle to keep Echo in stock, despite our best efforts. Some of this work is highly visible: our autonomous Prime Air delivery drones the Amazon Go convenience store that uses machine vision to eliminate checkout lines and Alexa, 1 our cloud-based AI assistant. Modern machine learning techniques now allow us to do the same for tasks where describing the precise rules is much harder.Īt Amazon, we’ve been engaged in the practical application of machine learning for many years now. Over the past decades computers have broadly automated tasks that programmers could describe with clear rules and algorithms. We’re in the middle of an obvious one right now: machine learning and artificial intelligence. These big trends are not that hard to spot (they get talked and written about a lot), but they can be strangely hard for large organizations to embrace. If you fight them, you’re probably fighting the future. The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won’t or can’t embrace powerful trends quickly. A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. Then, beta testing and research can help you find your blind spots. But you, the product or service owner, must understand the customer, have a vision, and love the offering. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. That is up from 47% in the first survey.” That’s hard to interpret and could unintentionally mislead. “Fifty-five percent of beta testers report being satisfied with this feature. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it’s the second.Īnother example: market research and customer surveys can become proxies for customers – something that’s especially dangerous when you’re inventing and designing products. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. This can happen very easily in large organizations. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.Ī common example is process as proxy. Resist ProxiesĪs companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen. Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. There are many ways to center a business. Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making. I don’t know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. There will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps. Such a question can’t have a simple answer. I’m interested in the question, how do you fend off Day 2? What are the techniques and tactics? How do you keep the vitality of Day 1, even inside a large organization? An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come. To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting.

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