Many Amazon employees are all too familiar with these fire drills and find them disruptive. “Why are entire teams required to drop everything on a dime to respond to a question mark escalation?” an employee once asked at one of the company’s all-hands meetings, which by 2011 were being held in Seattle’s KeyArena, a basketball coliseum with more than seventeen thousand seats. “Every anecdote from a customer matters,” Jeff Wilke answered. “We research each of them because they tell us something about our metrics and processes. It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers. We treat them as
...more
