Talk to your customers
It took me a week to write this post. I knew I had something to say beyond “June 3rd was my last day at Amazon” but I wasn’t sure exactly how to say it.
Lucky for me, I saw today that Brigid Johnson wrote the post I wanted to write from her own perspective. So thanks to her for saving me the headache! I recommend reading her most recent public post (starting with “As I scroll Linkedin these days…”) as it really resonates with my own experience with AWS.
So I guess I can use this space to say something else. Instead, I want to talk a little bit about working with customers at AWS. AWS is a huge business - thousands and thousands of customers, everyone from hobbyists to banks to governments and everything in-between. When I joined this role, I knew Amazon had a “focus on the customer” attitude but it was totally unimaginable to me at this scale. Coming from a background in computational math and data science, I assumed that the relationship with customers was entirely data driven. How else could you possibly figure out what your customers want? On my first “day 1” I was excited to learn all about data-driven product management techniques and put all the stuff I had learned in grad school to good use.
I could not have been more wrong. Data is of course an important aspect of the decision making process for a product manager at AWS, and there is a time and place for objective analysis to tell you all sorts of things that anec-data can’t. But data is not the primary source you might think it is. When I arrived I was shocked to learn how much time PMs spend face to face with customers. How is this scalable? I thought. How is this a good use of our time to just meet and go over the roadmap over and over? How am I going to have time to write this PRFAQ if I keep getting meetings added to my calendar like this?
Then I started attending those meetings. Then I started leading those meetings. Then I started seeking out more of those meetings. And it all clicked. You would not believe how much you can learn in these conversations: five minutes of talk with a systems engineer who is struggling to figure out the security strategy for their organization can tell you more than 100 hours of regression analysis in your data warehouse. Customer meetings are not just a roadmap delivery vehicle, they’re the lifeblood of your job as a product manager. If you cultivate the right relationships, you can even explore totally unfinished ideas, to validate your thinking or realize you are barking up the wrong tree entirely.
This is the biggest takeaway I have as I step away from my role at Amazon. It’s not the size of the business, it’s not the data, it’s the human connections that helped me grow the most here: both with our customers and the awesome team I was delighted to work with. I need to take time to focus outside of my professional life for a little while, but I will carry these skills and knowledge for a lifetime to come. I’ll see you in the next one!