In this session, we’ll review some of the mechanisms and best practices that enable innovation at Amazon, and discuss how they apply to startups. Get insight on how we structure our teams for autonomy and speed to ensure we're meeting the needs of the customer — a process we call Working Backwards. The goal? To drive simplicity through a continuous, explicit customer focus. We'll talk about how startups can apply the Working Backwards framework to develop a minimum set of technology requirements that satisfy market demand as well as the direction of your business.

1. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
James Wood
Manager - Manager Startup and Games, Nordic & Baltics
How we think about Innovation at
Amazon

2. Innovation

4. Invention comes in many forms and at
many scales. The most radical and
transformative of inventions are often
those that empower others to unleash
their creativity – to pursue their dreams.
Jeffrey P. Bezos
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Amazon.com, Inc.

5. …

6. The
Institutional
YES!
OUR MISSION
we want to be earth’s most
customer centric company

7. The
Institutional
YES!
OUR COMMITMENT
we make our customers’ lives
easier

8. The
Institutional
YES!
WHERE INNOVATION STARTS
we start with the customer and
work backwards

9. » Customer Obsession
“Start every process with the customer and work
backwards.”
»Long Term Thinking
“Be stubborn on the vision but flexible on the details.”
»If you want to be inventive, you have to be
willing to fail.
“We are willing to go down on a bunch of dark alleys
and occasionally we find something that really works.”
» You have to be willing to be misunderstood
for a long time.
“We are very comfortable being misunderstood.”
Our culture of
innovation

12. Service-Oriented
Architecture (SOA)
Single-purpose
Connected through APIs
Highly decoupled
“Microservices”

13. "organizations which design systems ... are
constrained to produce designs which are
copies of the communication structures of
these organizations."
— M. Conway

15. amazon vertraulich

16. +4,653
AWS Direct
Connect
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Schema Conversion Tool
AWS Shield EFS
WorkSpaces
Amazon Lumberyard
Amazon
Pinpoint
AWS IoT
AWS Managed Services
Amazon Route 53
AWS Import/Export
AWS OpsWorks for
Chef Automate
Redshift
Dynamo DB
Amazon Polly
AWS
Snowball
AWS Organizations
Device Farm
Amazon Config
Amazon RDS
for Aurora
WorkDocs
AWS
Snowball Edge
CodeCommit
AWS CodePipeline
AWS Service Catalog
CloudWatch Logs
Amazon Lex
AWS Greengrass
Amazon EC2
Systems Manager
AWS WAF
Amazon Appstream 2.0
Amazon
Athena
AWS Glue
Amazon Lightsail
Amazon Rekognition
AWS Step Functions
AWS Discovery
Services
AWS Certificate
Manager
Amazon
ElastiCache
Mobile
Analytics
AWS Mobile Hub
AWS Storage Gateway
AWS OpsWorks
AWS Batch
Amazon Inspector
EC2
Container Service
Amazon Cognito
AWS CodeDeploy
AWS Personal Health Dashboard
AWS Snowmobile
Lambda
* As of 1 September 2017
AWS Codebuild
AWS X-Ray
Amazon QuickSight
Amazon Kinesis Firehose
Amazon
Workmail
Amazon Inspector
Machine
Learning

22. The
Institutional
YES!
How do we organize for
Innovation?

23. » Mechanisms
Working Backwards Process
Andon Cord
Correction of Error (COE)
How do we
organize for
innovation?

24. The
Institutional
YES!
write the press release

25. The
Institutional
YES!
write the FAQ

26. The
Institutional
YES!
define the user interaction and write the manual

27. » Mechanisms
Working Backwards Process
Andon Cord
Correction of Error (COE)
» Architecture
Micro-services Architectures
Loosely Coupled Applications
Self Service Platforms – No Gatekeepers
How do we
organize for
innovation?

28. » Mechanisms
Working Backwards Process
Andon Cord
Correction of Error (COE)
» Architecture
Micro-services Architectures
Loosely Coupled Applications
Self Service Platforms – No Gatekeepers
» Culture
Our People: we hire builders, innovators,
entrepreneurs
Our Beliefs: Amazon Leadership Principles
How do we
organize for
innovation?

29. Everyone of us
is a leader on
our mission

30. » Mechanisms
Working Backwards Process
Andon Cord
Correction of Error (COE)
» Architecture
Micro-services Architectures
Loosely Coupled Applications
Self Service Platforms – No Gatekeepers
» Culture
Our People: we hire builders, innovators,
entrepreneurs
Our Beliefs: Amazon Leadership Principles
» Organization
Experimentation
Two Pizza Teams
How do we
organize for
innovation?

32. » Mechanisms
Working Backwards Process
Andon Cord
Correction of Error (COE)
» Architecture
Micro-services Architectures
Loosely Coupled Applications
Self Service Platforms – No Gatekeepers
» Culture
Our People: we hire builders, innovators,
entrepreneurs
Our Beliefs: Amazon Leadership Principles
» Organization
Experimentation
Two Pizza Teams
How do we
organize for
innovation?

33. The
Institutional
YES!
What do we expect from
the future?
enable everyone to innovate

34. The
Institutional
YES!
Evolution of Applications
LAYER PRE-2007 2007 - 2017 TO 2027
UX/UI Type/click Touch/text Multi-sense
Software Mostly “on-premise” SAAS adoption Intelligent Applications
Infrastructure Servers & Datacenters Public & Private Cloud
Serverless & Event-
driven

35. The
Institutional
YES!
AMAZON’S INNOVATION EQUATION
f(i) =
Culture Organization*
Architecture^Mechanisms *

36. The
Institutional
YES!
Innovation manifested across so many domains…
Drone Development
Advanced Shopping
Kindle Reader In-house
Entertainment
Grocery Delivery
Video Streaming
Home AutomationCloud Computing

37. culture
organization
mechanisms
architecture

38. We had three big ideas at Amazon that we
have stuck with for 20+ years, and they are
the reason we are successful: put the
customer first, invent and be patient.
Jeffrey P. Bezos
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Amazon.com, Inc.

39. James Wood
woodja@amazon.com
Thank you!

40. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
What’s on in Hall 6?
15:45-16:25
Go-to-market with AWS for Startups
Eric Morales - Startup Team Leader Nordics, AWS