How does innovation happen at Amazon? There are many perspectives available on the Net including that of Jeff Bezos. In this article, I would like to explore the CTO perspective as depicted in Werner Vogel’s interview by Kyle Corbitt (Nov-2018). But before I present my takeaways from the interview, let’s set the context.
Dr. Werner Vogels has been Amazon's CTO for almost 16 years.
That’s a very long tenure for a CTO position and perhaps very rare. He was a
research scientist for ten years before joining Amazon. He says, “I was hired
along with five of my former students to put academic rigor into scaling (the
platform) orders of magnitude more” (7:12). Not only did Vogels and the team
achieve that goal but also created a technology – AWS – that is enabling others
to do the same world over.
Early on in the interview (5:30), Vogels mentions that CTO’s
role is to “allow duplication and technical debt to happen as long as you know
that you have to pay it off”. And he says this technical debt is built through
“long pipeline of experiments.” Question is, what kind of experiments does he
sponsor? Where does he get the big ideas from? Do he and his team approve of every idea at Amazon? Answers to these questions are my key takeaways from this
interview.
Drive big programs: Vogels says, “Mostly the role of
CTO is to drive big programs” (11:05). For example, he drove an initiative a
whole year to address a single point of failure. It involved among other things pulling
the plug out of a data center and see how the technology copes with the
failure. As it became a practice, it got called “Game days”. Everybody is given
heads up on what is coming. And still, it exposed holes in the implementation. Another
year was spent on efficiency. (11:04)
Listen to customers: Where did the idea of AWS come
from? Vogels says his role as an external-facing CTO “is to interact at a deep
technical level with customers” and “look for bigger patterns among your
customers, the bigger pain points they have” (14:40). “We are in the business of pain management”
(14:50). The idea of AWS came from such observations. There are many types of CTOs
and an external-facing CTO is only one such role. However, I feel the importance
of meeting and listening to customers isn’t generally emphasized enough for a
CTO position. In this interview, Vogels goes into length in making this point.
Give autonomy to teams: It goes without saying that
CTO will play a key role in managing the pipeline of big bet experiments. The question is, what role does he play in managing a relatively small bet pipeline? Vogels
says that the teams such as “team for recommendation engine for shoes” are
responsible for managing their own pipeline of experiments. The team would have
a goal of minimizing the number of returns. He says, “95% of new features and
services are delivered as a response to direct requests from customers”
(32:55).
When asked to predict a future trend, Vogels says, “I think
we all need to become extremely security conscious” (48:56). He feels that the kind
of data breaches that are happening around “is embarrassing” (48:00). That is a
good clue to young and established businesses.
Overall, I really enjoyed the interview and feel there are
valuable insights especially for technical leaders.
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