How Amazon Uses Tenets to Make Better Decisions at Every Level

Welcome to my newsletter! I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. I write this newsletter I've called Scarlet Ink, which is a weekly newsletter on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.

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Amazon is well known for its writing culture. I thought I was a decent writer before working at Amazon, but I swiftly figured out that I had a lot to learn. I received a bunch of lovely and friendly feedback (that was sarcastic - Amazon feedback tends to be factual and direct) and got better.

Beyond just getting better at writing, I also found a lot to love about a process that focuses on clear and direct thinking. Because I'm absolutely convinced that part of being a good nonfiction writer is about clarity of thought. You think more clearly when you write, and your writing is better when you have an organized mind.

At Amazon there are a few classic elements of writing. There are 1-pagers and 2-pagers for things like project proposals. PR/FAQ docs to give the outward facing view of a new product. 6-pagers for full OP1 proposals, funding requests, etc.

In every one of those documents, you are likely to find a section labeled Tenets.

I love the tenet section. It's such a valuable concept. When done right, it forms the skeleton of how we think about the document topic.

I'm going to walk through everything about tenets. This includes what makes a good (and useful) tenet and a bad (and useless) tenet.

What are tenets?

Plenty of companies don't use or write tenets. I know when I entered Amazon I'd never heard of the concept. Let's start this topic by starting with the dictionary definition.

a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true - Merriam-Webster

Well, that's not too precise, is it? Let's write a sample tenet that fits this definition, and see if that definition is sufficient.

New test tenet: "Amazon should make money."

Yes, that tenet meets that generic dictionary definition. Amazon leaders all believe that Amazon should make money.

Except if that was one of Amazon's tenets, we would find the whole concept pointless. It's not useful to write down something we all agree with. "Air is useful for breathing." "The human body needs water." When you write down something 100% of people agree with, you're wasting your time.

Instead of looking at the dictionary definition, let's instead talk about how they're used. Because that gives us a clue on how they should be written.

Tenets are used to guide decision-making and resolve disagreements.

Tenets are written specifically to get us past decisions, which allows the team/department/company to make progress on their projects and goals.

There are two major ways they are used to get past decisions.

Make the right decision.

The most impactful decisions are often made by senior employees with careful consideration and understanding of the fundamentals of our business.

Except a well-run business wants to move quickly, and senior employees can be a bottleneck. To move quickly, a business needs to drive decision-making to the lowest (and therefore cheapest and most available) level of the company. In other words, when possible, you don't want that junior engineer asking their peers for help every time they have a question. You want them to bulldoze past simple and low-impact decisions and just get things done.

How do you communicate to your employees how to make decisions? You certainly can't anticipate every possible question and write down all the possible answers. The world is too complex. Instead, you break down the inputs to decision-making and encode those inputs into your tenets.

Avoid redeciding.

Those impactful and complex decisions can be expensive to resolve. Imagine that I'm arguing with a peer over a critical pricing decision. We argue for a while and then escalate to our respective managers when we realize we can't agree. Those managers unfortunately also disagree with each other, and so they escalate to our co-SVP. By the way, escalation (when actually needed) is not considered a failure at Amazon. It's part of the "working as designed" process to get resolution on impactful decisions quickly.

That SVP listens to everyone's opinions, thinks carefully, and decides based on all the inputs to the business.

"We care more about X than Y, and therefore we should do Z."

We now have an answer, and we're all aligned to move forward. However, these types of questions tend to come back up again. Perhaps we get a new hire. Or people just forget.

It's a waste of time to reargue this again in 6 months, assuming nothing has changed. Tenets are one way to ensure consistent decision-making, because we encode that decision-making framework into our tenets.

In this case, the tenet would be, "We care more about X than Y."

Since that decision leads naturally to Z, we know that future discussions (taking that tenet into consideration) would not require a long debate. We'd point at the tenet, observe that it leads to Z, and we can move forward.

By using tenets, you can quickly make the right decisions and avoid redeciding. When you utilize tenets correctly, it reduces the risk of granting more autonomy to your employees. This is not only more fun for your employees, but it enables your business to move more quickly.