Steve had hired leaders of the appropriate level and expertise to run each element of our product and business vision and had modified the org structure to accommodate them. With each modification, the scope of each leader’s responsibilities would become narrower, but the intended scale of each role was greater. At most companies, reducing a leader’s scope would be considered a demotion, and in fact there were many VPs and directors who saw each of these changes in that way. At Amazon, it was not a demotion. It was a signal that we were thinking big and investing in digital for the long term.
