Struggles scaling as a Director at Amazon

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Oct 26, 2023

The challenge of scaling as a leader is that we start with a small team doing one focused thing, and over time the team grows.

The first time I can pinpoint a specific struggle was as a Director at Amazon. I was the only pure tech leader at my level in the Consumer Electronics organization.

I wanted to become a Vice President, so I said yes to every challenge that was offered to me.

Soon I was either managing or advising a diverse set of businesses:

Digital video game tech.
Digital software code sales.
The first version of the Amazon Appstore.
I had an acquired subsidiary, Reflexive Entertainment, which made video games and sold games made by others.
I also was responsible for Amazon's small business-to-business (think "Office Depot") sales offering, supplying businesses with things like bulk printer paper. I advised the liquidation, returns, and mobile phone units.

In hindsight, this was a crazy charter.

A subsidiary, a set of new products, and a broad range of classic retail.

I probably should have never been given all these things nor should I have asked for or accepted them.

But I was empire building, focused on what might get me to the next level.

The lesson here is focus.

My biggest single technical mistake came while trying to spread myself over all of these functions.

I missed something, leading to a high-profile launch failure (read about it here), which led to losing the trust of my executive leaders. That mistake set my career and promotion back at least one to two years.

In the end, circumstances forced focus upon me. Amazon launched the Kindle line of tablets and the demands of taking the Amazon Appstore global required my full dedication. While I had struggled to lead ~200 people across all the functions listed above, I was able to lead several times this number successfully when focused on just one domain.

I get the temptation to step up and take on anything you are offered. I even recommend this as a growth technique (read about it here). But, you have to be cautious to keep coherency in your charter. We all know that task switching creates an overhead. My tasks were so separate that the resulting context switches were making me inefficient across the domains.

Ask for more; grow; but don't accept just any collection of opportunities.

Focus matters.

Reader follow-up questions

Q1: Was it an option to hire directors or dedicated GMs/leaders to look after each of the business units? Wouldn’t hiring great people help one scale in their role along with appropriate metrics and auditing mechanisms?

Each area had a leader...but because it was so many areas, those leaders could not be "big" leaders in the sense of highly experienced and independent.

None were above Amazon L7 (Senior Manager) and several were new to Amazon and/or L6 if you know Amazon / Google levels. They were all great individuals who have since gone on to much bigger and better things...but at the time I needed to be involved to varying degrees in each place.

So yes, 100% a way to scale is to hire and develop great leaders. But you do not always have this luxury at the speed you need it. I took on too much with too many leaders who were still learning.

Q2: So the essence is, leading incoherent businesses is not the issue but how you setup the team to scale in your role is. The issue in your case was, there wasn’t enough time to assemble a quality/experienced team. So, a key takeaways is, being aware of the situation and say no when you can’t scale (ex: no good leader to help you and you are already on the ground looking after an area with no good leader) and say yes opportunistically (ex: you get a good leader and/or you have rest of the areas covered by good leaders).

I would say that is partly the lesson.

No matter how good your leaders are, leading businesses as diverse as what I cited will always create a higher effort and toll, because there is no economy of scale. The thoughts, ideas, processes, and inventions of one area do not necessarily get you leverage in another.

I do not think you can oversimplify this to only setup. Too much diversity in focus (fragmentation) has a cost that you can reduce but not eliminate.

Share this article inside your workplace if you found it beneficial.

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