Organizations
How Amazon Uses Tenets to Make Better Decisions at Every Level
How to write tenets that resolve disagreements, prevent repeated debates, and empower employees to make better decisions independently.
Organizations
Organizations
Why Great Engineering Teams Don't Need Productivity Metrics
Measuring output and time spent is easy, while measuring efficiency and effectiveness is hard. Here's why trusting your engineers beats tracking their productivity.
Organizations
The Secret to Sounding Like a Senior Leader? Say Less.
The ability to communicate clearly, concisely, and with the right amount of context becomes more important as you climb the leadership ladder.
Organizations
The 5 Impacts of the Owner-Operator Model Regarding On-call, Operations, and Incentives.
By owning software end-to-end, at the expense of occasional annoying operational tasks, engineers are encouraged to build and maintain software the right way.
Organizations
My Experience at an Amazon Recruiting Trip
From scheduling chaos to final offers, a firsthand account of high-volume hiring at Amazon.
Organizations
The Cheese Pizza Problem: Consensus Is Killing Your Best Decisions
When everyone has a voice, the outcome gets safer, slower, and more boring. This is exactly the opposite of what great companies need.
Organizations
Big Companies Don’t Get Slower Because They Become Stupid
Designing processes and software to scale is expensive but necessary. I'll walk through why scaling by definition (basically always) leads to a loss of agility.
Organizations
Why do the Amazon Leadership Principles Work? How Do They Change Behaviors?
The Amazon Leadership Principles are awesome in driving behaviors within Amazon. Why don't other companies manage this type of behavior influence?
Organizations
You’re Not “Letting People Go”—You're Firing Them
Getting past the euphemisms - this is what “performance management” looks like from the manager chair.
Organizations
If Your System Never Fails, That’s the Real Failure
Investments in operations should be at a minimal level that maintains the systems in an acceptable state forever. Poor operations are clearly bad news. But perfect operations are a waste of money.
Organizations
The 4 Major Impacts of Amazon's Decentralization and Ownership Model
Amazon is decentralized and has a strong focus on ownership. This causes various positive and negative impacts. Let's walk through those impacts, and how you can navigate them successfully.
Organizations
The 5 Whys in Action: How to Turn Human Mistakes Into Lasting Improvements
When humans inevitably slip, the 5 Whys uncover the real fixes hiding beneath the surface. The 5 Whys expose our weak systems, not our weak people.