Event - FACCI - Innovation in Ambiguity

The following links provide additional detail and post event reading for attendees who would like to know more about innovation at Amazon and AWS. This talk was to the French Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry https://www.facci.com.au/

Amazon Mechanisms for Innovation

AWS Ops Wheel is used to ensure all teams are prepared to talk about their challenges and status https://github.com/aws/aws-ops-wheel . It’s designed to scale to hundreds of teams but remain within constrained weekly status meetings
Working Backwards is how all innovation emerges at Amazon. It’s not rocket science but it is useful because it allows you to innovation on behalf of our customers by focusing on what is important to them. Here’s an example of how we workshop Working Backwards https://innovation-amazon.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Working-Backwards-Booklet-WWPS.pdf . You can also watch a 17 minute video on Working Backwards from ReInvent 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFdpBqmDpzM
Amazon Leadership Principles are the Amazon culture, they define our behaviour. They aren’t a checklist and they aren’t elitist; we don’t consider ourselves anything other than ordinary in that respect, but they do guide us as we keep striving to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company. Note the deliberate friction between pairs of LPs. https://www.aboutamazon.com.au/about-us/leadership-principles
AWS Well Architected guides you to design, build, secure and operate well architected solutions. It’s not a checklist but a method of inquiry by you about your solutions that leverages the learning and wisdom of others https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/

Innovation Events

https://aws.amazon.com/events/ lists events for startups, business leaders, developers, partners and customers
The Adelaide AWS team is running a Deep Racer event 3 through 10 Nov 2021. It’s a great way to learn and experience Machine Learning in a fun and competitive environment. https://aws.amazon.com/deepracer/

Innovation Examples

Scrappy is a frequently used term at Amazon. When Covid struck in 2020 Andy Jassy, then CEO of AWS, advised everyone to keep innovating for customers and to stay scrappy. Note that scrappy means fast and focussed, not sloppy or poorly executed.
Here’s a great technical example of Amazon teams being scrappy as they continue innovating on behalf of customers while remote working. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/how-amazon-engineers-keep-inventing-from-home
Amazon has many different approaches to supporting others or responding to disasters. Much of this early work emerged as individuals chose to help or they ran simple experiments to help others. It’s since expanded into dedicated teams and capabilities.
Here are a few examples on AWS Disaster Response from the AWS Blog https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/category/public-sector/disaster-response/
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels regularly publishes on his blog https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/ He frequently talks about how Amazon innovates, how we do things at scale and he deep dives on some unusual customers
Did you know that the 2021 Australian Census was hosted on AWS? Simon Elisha, a long tenured Amazonian in Australia, dives into the details in his blog post titled ‘How the cloud helped to deliver a smooth experience for the 2021 Australian Census’ https://www.aboutamazon.com.au/news/aws/how-the-cloud-helped-to-deliver-a-smooth-experience-for-the-2021-australian-census

Thinking Differently

Products versus Projects. It’s not hard to see the Amazon Leadership Principles are more aligned with Products in https://www.solutionsiq.com/resource/blog-post/whats-the-difference-between-a-project-and-a-product/

The Importance of Communication

This medium article highlights why writing well is important at Amazon. It’s by an ex Amazonian and describes some examples of why writing well is a crucial part of the innovation process. https://medium.com/@sib1013/writing-docs-at-amazon-e025808616bd

Continue reading articles in my Amazon Web Services series