Invent like an Owner with Dave Schappell

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with John Vlastelica to talk about how Amazon scaled recruitment.  They'll discuss the origin and impact of the Bar Raiser program, where select employees helped pick top notch applicants, the birth of Making Great Hiring Decisions, Amazon's behavioral interviewing training, how Matt Round's MRT was designed for the interviewers not recruiters, and the challenges companies face scaling a high hiring bar.  John Vlastelica joined Amazon in 1998 as the Tech Recruiting Manager and then later became a Director of Recruiting. He helped build out the recruiting organization, programs and infrastructure during his 6 years there for what would become foundational to Amazon's incredible employee growth.Episode Resources: John Vlastelica's LinkedIn Consulting and Training from John's company, Recruiting Toolbox Website and Twitter Learn about the pros and cons of Bar Raisers: Barraisers.com Download the Hiring Manager Maturity Model and Culture of Recruiting Best Practices: https://go.recruitingtoolbox.com/hiring-manager-maturity-model Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 01:55 What is the Bar Raiser Program? 08:33 Hiring people that will make the overall team better 10:22 Embedding high hiring standard into every interview process 12:17 Tech teams and non-tech teams have different bar standards 16:34 Amazon's Interview Training Program - Making Great Hiring Decisions 20:00 The art of behavioral interviewing 25:04 Some of the drawbacks of the Bar Raisers program 28:30 How to scale a high hiring bar 32:43 People want to hire smart folks and they depend on proxies 37:21 Questions and scenarios to raise the bar mentality in the early days 38:48 Spent the last 16 years building Recruiting Toolbox 42:07 Overinvest in your hiring standards early 44:20 Bringing ownership into the recruiting culture 46:53 How John helps companies through Recruiting Toolbox 51:18 MRT shifted recruiting to more pipeline oriented, and allowed feedback on interview feedback, a very amazon thing to do  55:53 Creating a culture of ownership and recruiting ownership 59:03 Advice for CEOs and startups

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Eric Benson to discuss his myriad early software engineering projects at a time when Amazon was rapidly growing as a company. He implemented Book Matcher (which didn't last long) and the Similarities feature, and later built the original version of Weblabs that helped test which Amazon features were optimal. Eric also mentored many of the new software engineers, and later worked to port Amazon from Digital Unix to Linux (along with Bob Vadnais, and others).Eric Benson joined Amazon in 1996 as the 5th software engineer. He is currently a Software Consultant at United States Digital Service (USDS), a government agency composed of a group of technologists from diverse backgrounds working across the federal government to transform critical services for the people. Episode Resources: Eric Benson's LinkedIn and Twitter Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 02:39 Amazon's multi-day outage in 1997 05:15 Back then there was no backup server, just one customer database 07:09 Joining Amazon in 1996 10:00 Improving the website software was one of the first tasks 12:52 Book Matcher: people get recommendations after posting a rating 15:36 Developing the Similarities feature 24:10 Instant Recommendations    25:31 Promoting unusual items to show up in recommendations 27:00 Building v1 of Weblabs 34:16 People get burned out when there's too much information 37:34 CatSubst is putting marks in the HTML file to notify the software it serves 39:44 Experimenting between showing 3 and 5 similar items 41:09 Is every new feature slowing down the site? 42:54 The biggest problem with CatSubst 45:11 The hardware cost per unit was very high 49:21 Hardships of the engineering team while using Linux 53:27 Rufus the Dog and several site launches 57:26 Helping new engineers with language and coding 01:01:13 Software engineering at Amazon was too advanced for packaged software solutions from 3rd parties 01:04:05 From a small business to becoming a huge company

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Neil Roseman & Jorrit Van der Meulen. The discussion revolves around Amazon's DVD rental business which was launched outside of the US, the significance of the Subscription Management Service, and the transition to the Agile/Scrum product development methodology at Amazon.Neil Roseman is the former VP for Software Engineering at Amazon. He is currently the Technologist in Residence at Summit Partners - a funding company committed to finding and partnering with exceptional entrepreneurs to help them accelerate their growth and achieve dramatic results. Jorrit Van der Meulen originally joined Amazon in 1999 and left in 2005. After working at Zillow for nearly four years, he left and rejoined Amazon in 2008 as the VP for Content Sites. He's currently the VP for Amazon European Retail.Episode Resources: Neil Roseman's LinkedIn and Twitter Jorrit Van der Meulen's LinkedIn Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 02:51 Many people who don't live in the UK or Germany weren't aware of Amazon's DVD rental business 08:13 What happened after DVD rental was launched in the UK and Germany 10:27 Figuring out how to ship DVD's and then taking them back into rotation 12:18 The window people want to rent a DVD is super short 16:05 Reducing complexity by picking a market that was more solvable 19:35 How Jorrit joined Amazon 21:37 Launching the Subscription Management Service and moving to agile development 26:43 It was process that was both business and technical 28:33 Meeting with Jeff Bezos and the Subscription Service team 33:15 Key features of the Subscription Management Service 36:43 The difficult (and easier) aspects of creating Amazon Prime 40:52 Focus on creating an appealing pricing program 46:06 Integrating the business and development functions 49:26 Jorrit runs Amazon's retail business in Europe 50:17 Neil is currently the Technologist in Residence at Summit Partners

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with John Rossman. They talk about how the Merchants@ program was built from scratch, why working directly with third party sellers prompted the principle of seller obsession, launching the Apparel and Sporting Goods categories, developing smaller teams within the retail organization, and essentially, how Amazon's Leadership Principles led the way to writing his book, “The Amazon Way”.John Rossman is the former Director of Merchant Integration and Enterprise Services at Amazon. He spearheaded the launch of the Merchants@ program, one of the largest B2B networks with thousands of sellers, offering products in new categories such as apparel, sporting goods, consumer electronics, health and beauty, and home.Episode Resources: John Rossman's LinkedIn and Twitter The Amazon Way Book The Amazon Way Website Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 02:39 What is the Merchants@ Program? 04:41 Prior to Amazon, John was in a startup technology company 09:04 While there was Customer Obsession, they needed to create Seller Obsession 12:43 Inventory and catalog refreshes from daily to hourly 14:06 Account management team within the retail organization 15:51 Engineering and design work for customer and seller experience 17:43 Gently enforcing the parity clauses of the seller agreements 19:03 Building a three-option integration path for sellers 22:36 Working directly with third party sellers 24:30 The big launch for the Apparel category, followed by Sporting Goods 27:31 The evolution of Item Matching 30:59 Knowing when to have and not to have patience on something 31:49 A big no to “handshake' credit card deals to maintain customer trust 34:15 Self service registration, so that seller's could register without talking to anyone 35:50 Product promotions and processing refunds 38:26 Merchant.com was essentially a business outsourcing arrangement 41:44 Classification is one of the tricky parts in creating a great customer experience 44:17 M.com business wasn't winning  45:41 How "The Amazon Way" book came to be 47:41 Being good has never been the bar at Amazon 49:36 Truly understand the nature of experimentation in the business 51:42 Getting clarity in your thinking and getting senior leaders to sit down and listen 54:36 Startups should focus on instrumentation and metrics 56:36 You don't want to scale when you don't understand your unit cost basis

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Josh Petersen and Matt Round. The conversation takes us back to Amazon's early years, when the Personalization team was put together and built on features such as Similarities, Instant Recommendations, Cart Recommendations and more. The team strove to iteratively improve key features; over time, the Personalization and Automation worked toward Jeff Bezos' vision of “a store for every customer”. They also talk about the effectiveness of small cross-functional teams, feature testing through Weblabs, MRT (Matt's Recruiting Tool) - a tool still being used today, and much more.For over 20 years at Amazon, Josh Peterson helped create highly visible and innovative technologies used by millions of customers. He was the Director for the Personalization team and then led different teams at Amazon including Prime Photos/Cloud Drive, AWS, and Bots/NLU. Matt Round is the former Director of Software Development, and later became the Managing Director responsible for establishing the Amazon Development Centre in Scotland (a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com) including full responsibility for team building, project selection and implementation oversight. Episode Resources: Josh Petersen's LinkedIn Matt Round's LinkedIn Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 02:01 Personalization feature examples 05:17 How Personalization features were evaluated 08:00 Item to item similarities versus collaborative filtering 09:40 Personalization aims to build out a store for every customer 12:17 Putting together a team focused on Personalization 14:12 Tracking which features were generating which results 17:12 How do Weblabs work? 20:17 Big wins for the Personalization features 24:22 How did Personalization work for new customers? 28:53 Impact on Editorial team when Personalization became more automated 32:30 Amazon's customer reviews 34:14 Emergence of advertising on Amazon 39:29 Two Pizza Team model: small cross-functional teams with a narrow focus 42:57 Personalized merchandising and Automated merchandising  47:27 Matt's Recruiting Tool (MRT): a simple tool to manage the interview process 50:24 The Amabot Story 54:46 Iquitos: the first successful microservice at Amazon   59:10 Pressure from the product side produced innovation on the technical side 01:00:14 By testing a lot of things, you learn about things you don't know. 01:02:56 Listening to data is very important

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Rebecca Allen. They travel through memory lane by talking about the restructuring of Amazon's catalog using Base 36, the complications of recycling ISBNs that led to the creation of Amazon's Standard Identification Number (ASIN), how the Title Authority feature helped customers find books through associations, the seemingly impossible to accomplish Used Books category, and so much more.Rebecca Allen is a former Software Engineer at Amazon from March 1996 to September 1998. She helped in the programming of creating and maintaining the book catalog, creating tools to modify the Amazon catalog, and much more.Episode Resources: Rebecca Allen's LinkedIn Interview with Amazon's Technical Co-founder And Employee #1, Shel Kaphan Interview with engineer Paul Davis (Second Employee at Amazon) Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter Sponsored by Skilljar.com founded by ex-Amazonians Sandi Lin and Jason Stewart. Skilljar is transforming the way enterprises onboard, engage, and retain their customers. What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 02:36 Discovering Amazon and then joining the team 05:25 Hired to work on catalog and search engine 07:12 The original catalog sources weren't customer facing 10:16 Who made the requests to edit the catalog  11:27 Developing the typo tool to allow the catalog department to fix content errors 14:03 The complications of recycling ISBNs; building the Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) 21:31 People were worried about the backward compatibility of ASINs 24:09 ASINs have been increasing rapidly over the years 27:37 Base 36 is a really unique solution, but has worked extremely well 29:26 Definition of Biblio Records 34:38 What is Title Authority? 37:21 Helping readers find what they want through associations 41:38 Have ASINs been licensed or was it built just for Amazon? 42:35 Introducing the Used Books catalog from the Library of Congress 45:36 Order database broke down when Used Books was launched 48:47 Differing opinions and the pressure to convince people 50:58 Coming up with alphabetical search results 54:21 How the catalog set up Amazon competitively 57:00 “If you know your problem, your solution will be better.” - Rebecca Allen 

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Maryam Mohit. They talk about the different iterations of the early Amazon website that massively improved customer experience. Key improvements included navigation, browse, adding search to the homepage, personalizing the website, adding electronic gift certificates, expanding to new categories and much more. It was all made possible by listening to customers and translating their confusion and input into innovative product solutions.Maryam Mohit, former VP for Site Development, was one of Amazon's earliest employees, and was hired to “make the Amazon website interactive”. She went from working with a small initial team (one HTML developer and hiring the first QA) to running what became a department of more than 200 front-end engineers, web developers, designers, editors and researchers responsible for the features and functionality of the website, and the overall online customer experience.Episode Resources: Maryam Mohit's LinkedIn Nextdoor One Sky Giving Circle BrightWorks Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 02:23 Joining Amazon in 1996 07:15 Talked to customers to understand the problems they were having with the Amazon website 11:18 Search page wasn't yet a part of the Amazon homepage 11:51 The Amazon Checkout pipeline was a 12-page process 13:35 Barnes and Noble was the biggest competition 14:22 What Amazon's V2 homepage looked liked  15:58 Goals set during the site redesign 19:13 The 1-Click ordering feature and how it came to be 27:14 After every major project, teams did post-mortem sessions 30:53 Executing customer feedback and incorporating it into the Amazon website 32:14 Amazon's V4 launch was a holiday release 36:56 HTML 1.0 was basically writing every page by hand 39:29 With V5, Amazon launched other products aside from books (music/CDs) 45:50 Signed their Meeting maker launch schedule in blood 47:39 Tabbed navigation introduced for the first time 50:52 V6 focused on Amazon Video/DVD store and the holiday gift center 55:00 Feel the urgency of the pain that customers are saying in their own voice

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Shawn Haynes. They discuss how the Amazon Associates team built and grew the affiliate marketing program. Shawn grew the team from several hundred initial affiliate marketing websites to more than 500,000 by the time he moved on. He shares how the learnings from early Associates economics, such as focusing on cost per new customer rather than margin on individual sales, helped inform the Premium Associates and Megadeals that Amazon pursued later.Shawn Haynes was the first Amazon Associates Program Manager and later was a Director of Product Development for Electronics.Episode Resources: Shawn Haynes' LinkedIn Subscribe to our Newsletter Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter Several of Shawn's favorite products of late Spade L Ranch Beef Marinade Vanatoo Transparent Zero Powered Speakers Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 02:39 Amazon Associates Affiliate Marketing 04:07 Why work at Amazon? 07:51 Hired to grow the Amazon Associates program 10:57 How innovative affiliate marketing was back in 1996 13:09 Commission rates third party sites could earn 17:24 Amazon Associates Getting Big Fast 21:15 Initial challenge after joining Amazon Associates 25:35 Seemingly simple components that needed a new system 31:30 Associates Central is still working and serving customers 33:31 Different types of Associates site 36:32 Crohn's Disease specialist leaving a review on their own book 39:19 How the Associates program supported megadeals 43:07 Promoting Amazon's Best Seller list drove huge customer demand 44:37 Tips for new entrepreneurs to be more innovative 46:24 Many early deals were based on ad impressions 49:20 Amazon's Core Values that stood out for Shawn 52:02 The David Breashears story

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Alex Edelman. They talk about how an English Major from the University of Pennsylvania joined Amazon as the company's first dedicated “HTML Wizard”, why the V3 project (in 1997) was mainly about obsession over customer experience, the thrilling yet exhausting experience during Launch Nights, and how a boating accident led to shared ownership through pager rotation.Alex Edelman is an internet veteran. He was Amazon.com's first web developer, and has decades of experience building and scaling innovative web sites, mobile apps, and web service APIs. Lately, his focus is on serving his family's community, often leading in school fundraising and event planning.Episode Resources: Alex Edelman's LinkedIn Worldreader Rainier Scholars Subscribe to our Newsletter Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 02:16 How did you get to Amazon? 06:07 Amazon set its eyes on the growing internet presence 07:04 Hired under the site development and editorial team 08:10 First major project after joining Amazon 13:11 Reason why relational databases weren't an option before 14:20 Pushing for the customer recommendations feature 15:19 The difficulties of developing Amazon V3 17:12 Engineers built basic templating system for editorial team to use 19:33 Launch Nites of big projects 24:32 It's a collective mission to serve the customers 25:47 Product images and developing an image server  29:29 The Pager Story 33:01 From books to launching new products 37:18 Macro templates and expansion of UI features 39:53 What is brutal triage? 41:52 Young technologies don't have great tooling   43:26 Winning the Just Do It award (3 times) 46:43 Interface programming has come a long way

Today, on the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Blake Scholl. They discuss Blake's time working on the Amazon Personalization team, and how he went on to build the team that built Amazon's Automated Advertising engine, that dynamically placed ads on Google Ads (before Google even had an API). Amazon's Automated Advertising engine started slow, but went on to drive billions in profitable sales for the company. It was fun to hear not only about the successes, but also about the missteps along the way.Blake was formerly the Manager of Automated Advertising and Social Networks, and is currently the Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, which is redefining commercial flight by bringing supersonic flight back to the skies.Episode Resources: Blake Scholl's LinkedIn Blake Scholl's Twitter Boom Supersonic Subscribe to our Newsletter Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 02:44 Why did you join Amazon? 04:45 First project in the Personalization Services team 08:13 The Personalization Service algorithm 11:40 Experiencing the early days of Google Ad Words 19:47 The plan to be the ‘default' app for online shopping 20:41 How long it took to build Google paid placements 25:03 Writing product ad content and pricing range 27:43 Placing ads on Google pre API 33:21 Running Google Ads on corporate credit card exceeding the limit 35:28 Amazon's first version of a Pizza Team 36:24 The most cringe-worthy moments  39:10 Screening automation on non-profitable ads 40:46 The confluence of two bugs 42:22 Tips for innovators to succeed in their business ventures 44:56 Post Amazon business startups and founding Boom Supersonic

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Colleen Byrum and Jane Slade. The discussion surrounds how the Customer Service team wasn't just the people in the Customer Service department, but everyone who joins the company. In the early days, almost all employees got trained in Customer Service support, even engineers and SVPs!Jane Slade, former director of Customer Service Strategy - Customer Experience, Product Development, Finance, and Operations. Colleen Byrum, former director of Customer Service and former VP for Amazon.de and Amazon.co.uk. Recently, both were working at Freightera. Episode Resources: Colleen Byrum's LinkedIn Jane Slade's LinkedIn Freightera Freight Marketplace Subscribe to our Newsletter Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 02:03 What customer service support was like in the early days 04:09 Varying questions from Amazon's early adaptors 05:58 Training for customer support was done basically side by side 06:57 Mid-May 1996 was the first flood of customers 08:40 Early customer support was phone-only before email became dominant 09:45 Jeff Bezos liked to hire smart people (advanced degrees were a good proxy) 12:00 The number one Customer Service question 12:32 What happened after the Wall Street Journal surge? 19:04 Jeff looked for intuitive qualities in people 20:57 Massive search to fill up shortage in Customer Service headcount 22:50 Amazon Customer Service support scaling up 25:33 Third party CS software could not keep up with the existing volume 29:15 Customers call because something went wrong 31:43 Figuring out which orders should go first 34:48 Key metrics in sending and tracking orders 36:18 Hands are full during Christmas and people are being sent to distribution centers  39:11 Customer Service is an incubator for other jobs in Amazon 40:32 Working around very small vendors for books 42:47 What's the most memorable online complaint? 44:07 CS lessons for startup companies

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Dwayne Bowman and Ruben Ortega. They discuss the birth of Bowtega Box, maintaining the balance between adding new features and continuous upscaling and customer support, and redesigning and refining Amazon's Search functionality.  Ruben is the former director of Amazon's Mechanical Turk and CTO of A9.com (Amazon's innovative search subsidiary), and was responsible for its early scaling and technical success. He also participated in designing infrastructure that could dynamically scale from hundreds to thousands of transactions per second. Dwayne, a former software engineer at Apple, was Amazon's former Director of Engineering and took part in redesigning Amazon's Search engine.   Episode Resources: Dwayne Bowman's LinkedIn Visit Woodlawn School Ruben Ortega's LinkedIn Check out Tonal Help support devcolor.org and NDRC Subscribe to our Newsletter Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 01:40 How Amazon's Bowtega Box came to be 06:52 Making it easier for customers to navigate such as browse tree for relevant searches 08:13 Why was the alphabetical algorithm the only option in 1996-1997? 09:47 Sales jumped significantly when Bowtega Box was launched 11:21 Fixing Amazon's Search feature for better user experience 15:23 Building a catalog for a new book consumed a lot of time 17:53 Balancing new features versus scaling and support 19:08 Preventing downtime while Search updates are ongoing  22:03 Hire people who take the problem and solve it 24:08 Without A/B Testing, take the right signal for the next step 25:45 Where did the Bowtega name originate? 26:44 What was Amazon like in 1997 - 1998? 28:10 The Bar Raiser team  30:48 Amazon's Search team set the bar for hiring engineers 32:06 How did the product mix change search complexity? 34:22 Amazon's first word-based ad product 36:18 Expanding the accessibility of Search in e-commerce

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Joel Spiegel - the former VP of Engineering and VP of Auctions & Marketplace Businesses at Amazon - and currently a Trustee at Grinnell College. He is one of the leading figures in Amazon's transition from a retail-centric business model to a marketplace-driven business model.Joel worked at tech pioneers including Visicorp, HP, Apple and Microsoft before joining Amazon.com in 1997. He talks about his busy years after joining Amazon as well as the seemingly endless challenges of restructuring the company to cater to both buyers and sellers along with the technical aspects that made all these changes possible.  Episode Resources: Joel's LinkedIn Visit Worldreader Subscribe to our Newsletter Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 01:52 How it all started for Joel 06:09 Other big contributors in the early days 07:34 What made Joel decide to join Amazon? 09:31 The first projects and early web development 11:32 Splitting database and different technical issues every month 14:27 How Amazon became a third-party seller marketplace 21:02 From a general manager to supervising the marketplace 21:49 Why Amazon Auctions were necessary  26:29 The introduction of the Best Seller List 28:32 Evolution of selling through Auctions and zShops to creating Amazon Marketplace 34:26 Convincing retail customers to try out Amazon Marketplace 38:43 Seller Central: building tools for sellers  41:54 Launching of Single Detail Page made buying products from Marketplace Sellers work for Amazon shoppers 45:05 It wasn't easy to get buyers and sellers in the early days 48:12 What future entrepreneurs can learn from Amazon's transition to a Marketplace-driven business model

In our first ever episode, Dave speaks with Kim Rachmeler, former VP Worldwide Discovery and member of the S-Team at Amazon.com, Inc. She's a skilled engineer and web developer whose efforts helped build and develop Amazon literally from the ground up. She shares the challenges of working with a small team of engineers when tech engineers were scarce and some of the iconic steps the company has taken to cope with consistent monthly growth.Episode Resources: Visit Upaya Social Ventures Check out Kim's LinkedIn Subscribe to our Newsletter Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 02:16 How Kim started at Amazon 04:50 What three things do you need to want something? 07:14 Working as a Technical Project Manager for the first time 09:41 Figuring out different process and running experiments 13:39 On the 3rd version release of the Amazon website 15:40 It started with more or less 35 people doing everything 17:20 A 30% monthly growth had created several technical issues  20:31 Preventing downtime while website maintenance is ongoing 23:13 Adding categories and other big changes 26:15 Engineers are difficult to hire back in the day 28:56 It was mainly an engineering problem for a long while  29:53 From being an engineer to becoming a TPM 34:20 Nightly builds prompted people to pay more attention 37:16 The service-oriented architecture 40:24 Just Do It Award: how it came to be 41:44 “Bias for Action” as a core value 45:24 Overworking resulted in success, but it's unhealthy  47:59 Tips for young entrepreneurs

Welcome to the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, where I'll talk with the Amazonians who helped build Amazon.com into one of the world's most valuable companies.The goal of the podcast is to capture the Amazon Creation Stories and create a historical archive... before we forget all the details -- that's it.And if you're a little old school and would like email updates, sign up for my email newsletter at www.InventLikeAnOwner.comOnward!~ Dave Schappell