[3/3] Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon (Amazon strategy) (Category Management)

Finishing the Amazon Book Started in Posts 1 and 2The second part of the book is called “A Machine for Inventions in Action.” In this part of the book, the author talks about 4 top products of Amazon, which became the top in the company. The story itself is interesting in the context of demonstrating the application of the principles from the first part of the book. Actually, these are the products. 1) Kindle The Kindle story begins with Amazon betting on digital goods at all. It wasn’t easy, as before the focus was on physical goods, where range and logistics were Amazon’s competitive edge. These advantages no longer mattered. As a result, the single-threaded head of the level of the first vice president went to develop this direction, and before that, this direction was led by the product manager at the head of the company. 4 It's lower in the structure. The bottom line is that the guys at Amazon were looking at the issue of digital products from the perspective of a platform where there are content creators on one side, there are content consumers on the other, and in the middle of the value chain there is aggregation of them in one place. Then the guys went from the needs of customers and decided that they need to make it so that it was convenient to read e-books. Hence the idea to make a reader, and the company was not embarrassed by the lack of competence in the creation of iron. In 2005 Amazon bought French company Mobipocket, which made software for viewing and reading e-books, and opened Lab126 to create hardware. The essence of the device was that it lay well in the hand, shook with the electronic library without wires. (mobile) It had an e-ink screen that provided a long run. At the end of several years of work, a bestseller in the form of a Kindle turned out. 2) Prime A story about the creation of a subscription that allowed Amazon to increase the user base and frequency of purchases. Interestingly, it was not possible to calculate the economic effect and Jeff Bezos gave the go-ahead for the experiment, which ended successfully. Many companies are now trying to create their own ecosystem subscriptions, but few are doing well. 3) Prime Video Here the story begins with the first attempt to launch a video service, then continues with the transition to the VOD model. (video-on-demand)And then create a video service as part of a Prime subscription. In fact, this removed the pressure on the product in terms of cost vs value, as it became free for subscribers. It was a way of moving Amazon to the side of content producers, as then Amazon began to make their own movies and compete with other content creators of the kind: Netflix, HBO, Disney, Disney, and others. 4) AWS The history of the most popular cloud is slightly revealed, if you evaluate from the geeks, but there is an interesting point that AWS began initially with the creation of an API for affiliate programs - this is affiliate marketing, where Amazon partners could display products from the Amazon website on their pages on the Internet. If visitors to sites bought some goods on Amazon, clicking on these links, the site owners received a small money from Amazon. In fact, for this program created an API for obtaining data about goods, and then went on and on the API became more and more, and in 2006 AWS appeared with generic services such as EC2 and S3, which allowed you to assemble your applications on the cloud from Amazon. Interestingly, the authors say not only about the successes, but also the failures of the species. Fire Phonewho lived for a little over a year:)

In general, the book was definitely interesting to read and disassemble - even taking into account the refinement of the stories, you can learn a lot of interesting things from these stories of the authors.

#Management #Leadership #Processes #Strategy