innovation the amazon way · innovation the amazon way build innovation into the dna of your...

Innovation the

Amazon Way

Build Innovation into the

DNA of Your Company

“The culture is what forms the

foundation for all future innovation. If

you break the culture, you break the

machine that creates your products.”

Brian Chesky, Founder

https://medium.com/@bchesky/dont-fuck-up-the-culture-597cde9ee9d4

Culture

Culture

Organization

Architecture

Mechanisms

2008 2009 2010 2011

Amazon EBS

Amazon EC2

Amazon SNS

AWS Identity & Access Management

AWS Import & Export

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon EMR

Amazon RDS

Amazon VPC

Auto Scaling

Elastic Load Balancing

Amazon ElastiCache

Amazon SES

AWS CloudFormation

AWS Direct Connect

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

GovCloud

Amazon SWF

Amazon Route 53

Amazon Redshift

Amazon Glacier

Amazon Dynamo DB

Amazon CloudSearch

Amazon EC2

AWS Storage Gateway

Amazon CloudTrail

Amazon CloudHSM

Amazon WorkSpaces

Amazon Kinesis

Amazon Elastic Transcoder

Amazon AppStream

AWS OpsWorks

AWS Data Pipeline

2013 2012

A Rapid Pace of Innovation

Work Backwards from the Customer

1. PRESS RELEASE

1. PRESS RELEASE

2. FAQ

1. PRESS RELEASE

2. FAQ

3. USER MANUAL

Loosely coupled.

Hardened APIs with good documentation.

2 PIZZA TEAMS

“If you want to increase

innovation, you have to

lower the cost of failure.”

Joi Ito

Director MIT Media Lab

SPEED OF ITERATION

BEATS QUALITY OF ITERATION

Build the Minimum Viable Product

using Agile Development techniques

Continuous Integration

Continuous Deployment

Deploying More Frequently Lowers Risk

Frequent Release Events

“Lean Methodology”

Rare Release Events

“Waterfall Methodology”

Smaller Effort

“Minimized Risk”

Larger Effort

“Increased Risk”

Business Value of Frequent Deployments

75% 90% ~0.001% Reduction in

outages triggered

by software

deployments since

2006

Reduction in

outage minutes

triggered by

software

deployments

Software

deployments

cause an outage

Reinforcing Mechanisms

Remove Friction

Priority Setting

Fight the Monolith

Culture

Organization

Architecture

Mechanisms

Innovation

(mechanism * culture)

f(innovation) = (org * arch)

INNOVATION IS NOT A GOAL,

IT’S AN ONGOING PROCESS

“We've had three big ideas at Amazon

that we've stuck with for 18 years, and

they're the reason we're successful:

put the customer first, invent, and be

patient.”

Jeff Bezos

Thank you

adamfitz@amazon.com