Day 1 Is About Doing What’s Right. Day 2 Is About Getting Promoted.
The shift from customer obsession to career obsession happens quietly, usually through the hiring process. But as your original leadership team transitions out, a new culture moves in.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.
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A side discussion before I get to the main article about culture. I wanted to briefly talk about the 2-week notice thing for quitting a job. Because I’ve had a few people ask me questions about giving notice.
At least in the US, you can quit at any time (just as they can fire you at any time). However, there’s a generally accepted best practice of giving at least 2-weeks notice when leaving a company. “My last day will be in 2.5 weeks on X date.”
However, particularly with the younger crowd bitter about capitalism, you’ll frequently see comments like “It’s unfair, because the company won’t give you 2 weeks notice if they fire you. We should just quit without notice!”
I think this overlooks a couple of things.
Don’t burn bridges. This one is obvious to anyone older. I worked in the tech industry for years, and it shocks me how small the world is. It’s like the Kevin Bacon thing, where everyone is just a few steps removed from each other. “Oh, you know Sally too? Yeah, she used to work with my friend Dominik…” And I’ve repeatedly heard of someone losing a job opportunity (or promotion) because they’d rubbed someone else the wrong way a few years ago. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot.
The 2-week notice isn’t for the corporation; it’s for your co-workers. Do you think Amazon itself cared if I gave notice? Heck no. Amazon itself wouldn’t blink if everyone gave zero notice, and it would continue functioning fine. It’s your boss, your team members, and your peers that are impacted if you leave without sufficient notice. If your peer left with zero notice and you suddenly had to deal with 17 new tasks and emergencies, there’s a good chance you’d be angry at them.
As your work social network grows, and your peers have larger and larger social networks, it’s remarkable how much everything is connected. I know someone at almost every major company, and it’s common to ask peers about your reputation before you get hired somewhere. Don’t be a goofball and get hung up on the idea that you’re sticking it to the man. The man doesn’t even know you exist.
Anyway, moving on to my main topic.
What is Day 1 vs. Day 2 thinking?
I joined Amazon in December of 2007. I was incredibly lucky to join at a time when most of Amazon was solidly in their agile Day 1 era.
I’ll let Jeff explain a bit about the idea.
The idea is that you are open to change and new ideas as long as you view this as the start of your company. By focusing on the idea of “We’re just starting here” you are less likely to get stuck on the horrible “This is the way we’ve always done it.”
In large part it’s about agility as well. Let’s take a look at this AWS webpage about Day 1 culture. There’s a lot of gold on that page.
“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.”
“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”
When I first joined Amazon, I quickly realized that infighting over scope was pointless. As I told people, there was an infinite amount of work, and my team was drastically under-resourced for the amount of work available. If someone wanted to take over one of my projects, they could feel free!
In fact, a few years later (after I had moved on to another team), my 6-person space was well over a hundred people. Clearly there was enough scope for many people to be satisfied.
When mentoring other employees, I explained what I saw as the truth. There was infinite opportunity for growth. You were limited by your imagination, your intelligence, and the amount of hours you were willing to put into things.
And that’s precisely how people should feel in an agile company. That your career is limited by your abilities, not corporate garbage.
As companies grow, they bog down. They gain management layers and processes, and many employees who acted like owners move on.
When your management chain has three VPs and you’re in meetings all day, how do you stand out? How do you get your manager and their peers to notice you enough to move your career forward? What types of things will they notice and care about?
Unfortunately, it’s likely to be different things than when your company was still in Day 1 territory.
Over my years at Amazon, I saw pockets of Day 1 behavior, and growing pockets of Day 2 behavior. My overall interpretation was that the Day 1 behavior was encouraged and rewarded when you had a long-tenured senior leader in place. One who remembered the earlier days of Jeff and simply cared about doing the right thing.
The increasing instances of Day 2 behavior tended to come from organizations with externally hired senior leaders who were interested in being successful Amazonians, with a lower priority put on successfully building things for customers.
This article dives into examples of Day 2 behaviors.