At work, we regularly get our Product Owners and Product Managers together to discuss developments in our company and in the PM industry. This week we had a great conversation around Jeff Bezos’ recent letter to Amazon stakeholders, and below is a discussion guide if you’d like to facilitate the conversation at your company too! The letter outlines the top ways that Amazon avoids Day 2, (the gradual decline into obsolesce,) through true customer obsession, resisting proxies, embracing external trends, and high-velocity decision making. Our conversation was free-form, and many of these questions were covered naturally and asked by others, but it’s always great to have a set of backup questions ready to go to spark debate. Even if you don’t do a discussion group, I highly recommend reading the letter.
- Quick Take – Go around the room
- What did you think about the letter?
- What was your top take-away?
- Overall
- What day are we on, Day 1 or Day 2?
- True Customer Obsession
- Do you feel we have true customer obsession?
- How are our customers “beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied”?
- How could we highlight and lean into our customer obsession, or improve it?
- Resist Proxies
- Do we have any proxies? Could we avoid using them?
- Do we have any cases where our process is the proxy for the results we want? Do we own the process, or does the process own us?
- Do we have any proxies for customers?
- How could we highlight and lean into resisting proxies, or improve it?
- Embrace External Trends
- What’s the last external trend we embraced?
- Are there external trends that we should be embracing?
- How could we highlight and lean into embracing external trends, or improve it?
- High-Velocity Decision Making
- What is our decision making velocity? High, medium, or low?
- Do we have the right amount of decision-making processes?
- Do we make decisions with 70% of the information?
- Do we “disagree and commit”?
- Do we recognize misalignment early and escalate?
- How could we highlight and lean into high-velocity decision making, or improve it?
- What actions and next steps should we take from this conversation?