Business leaders often talk with my team about increasing innovation across their organizations.
They’ve heard Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, describe the Amazon “Day 1” mindset that keeps our company focused on long-term thinking, customer obsession and bold experimentation. And they’ve seen Amazon deliver new experiences, like Amazon Prime and Kindle, to our customers and launch entirely new businesses, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), which maintains the fastest pace of innovation in the cloud services industry.
They want to know: “How can we do this in our organization?”
In some ways, that’s a difficult question to answer, because there isn’t just one way to innovate. We work with successful, inventive companies around the world and have encountered a wide variety of effective methods for increasing innovation. At AWS—and Amazon broadly—our approach is to apply mechanisms that foster customer obsession, high-velocity decision making and constant experimentation. Moreover, because responsibility for innovation belongs to everyone at Amazon, we equip our employees with the data- and cloud-based tools they need to build new customer experiences quickly. The cloud also lowers the cost of experimentation, giving our team members greater confidence to try out new ideas and, if something doesn’t work, explore a different direction.
Customer-obsessed mechanisms and cloud technology provide the foundation for Amazon’s innovation culture. At AWS, we rely on them every day and often work with customers to help them experiment with integrating these elements into their own organizations.
By Richard Halkett, Worldwide Lead, Digital Innovation, AWS
Here are four ways to make customer obsession a cornerstone of your innovation strategy: