Innovation First: Building the Mindset, Leadership, and Culture for a Customer-Centric Business

The Amazon Leadership Principles provide a consistent framework to guide actions and decisions, empowering every employee to play their part in bringing innovation to customers. The leading principle for Amazon is Customer Obsession and the central tenet of this approach is the “Day 1” mentality.

While this is both a culture and an operating model that encapsulates everything from being constantly curious to applying lessons learnt from failures, the most important aspect is customer obsession, as Daniel Slater, Worldwide Lead, Culture of Innovation at AWS, points out. It reinforces the commitment to understanding customers’ challenges and to help solve them.

As Amazon fine-tuned its principles over the decades, customer obsession has remained the most important part of the Amazon Day 1 mentality.

The Amazon customer-centric innovation approach—working backwards—is how it delivers on the principle of customer obsession. To put it simply, just start with the customer and work backwards. It is an important mechanism—a guided innovation process—by which Amazon ensures not to innovate in isolation or to build technology or services for their own sake. It’s imperative to understand the customers’ needs, challenges, and pain points before inventing the ideal solution.

The leadership principles empower all AWS talent. This means empowering individuals and teams to experiment with ways to meet and exceed customers’ needs. And empowering individuals through ownership and autonomy, from providing specific areas of focus to grow subject matter experts to ensuring that their voices and ideas aren’t lost within large, inefficient structures.

The challenges around Amazon scaling to better meet customers’ needs resulted in AWS and the cloud technology foundation that underpins its ongoing innovation.

AWS now offers customers this same advantage through cloud solutions that support agility, help organizations cost-effectively scale operations, and provide the tools to innovate services and grow businesses. 

Truly innovator companies often reflect on some key questions: Are you motivated by customer obsession? Does your talent have the skills to find new routes to growth for your business? Can you move at a pace that keeps you at the top of your industry’s transformation—and ahead of your competitors?

In Pushing the Boundaries of Innovation: Speed, Scale, and Transformation in the Cloud, learn what innovation means to AWS and to its customers.

• Discover the characteristics of organizations that can turn ideas into opportunities at speed.
• Read how leaders in their fields combine cloud technologies such as machine learning and serverless computing with a culture of innovation to drive greater efficiencies and deliver pioneering services.
• See how the AWS commitments to data protection, sustainability, and innovation support the success and transformation of thousands of businesses across Europe.

By building on the critical elements of customer centricity, experimentation, and learning, energy providers deliver more sustainable power solutions, health firms personalize cancer care, and manufacturers drive cleaner, smarter automotive experiences.