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Why Did Jeff Bezos Send Question Mark Emails?

Ethan Evans says a question mark email was how Jeff Bezos scaled customer obsession when he was too busy to investigate every complaint. If a customer wrote him about your area, you received a forward of that complaint with a single question mark at the top. Everyone knew what it meant. You had 24 hours to explain what happened to that customer.

The best reply showed it was a weird exception and not a real pattern. The next best showed a real problem with a fix already underway. The worst was admitting the fix would take a while. When Evans ran Amazon's app store, Bezos sent something harsher than a question mark: "Please tell me we're not doing this." The team had to answer that they were. Bezos wrote back, "euthanize me." Evans says leaders across Amazon can each tell their own version. The customer who wrote Jeff was Jeff's customer, and the question mark meant you would fix it.

Transcript

Ex-Amazon VP tells us what it’s really like working with Jeff Bezos ·

My First Million

More from this episode

  1. Why Did Jeff Bezos Only Give Criticism?Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos was not mean, but he was demanding, and he almost never said anything good. He would hear an idea and name the three things to fix.
  2. Why Did Jeff Bezos Ship the Fire Phone?Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos fell into the flaw of every great man.
  3. Why Did Jeff Bezos Call a Team the B Team?Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos once stopped a meeting and asked whether the A team for the project was available, because the people in the room were clearly the…
  4. Why Did Jeff Bezos Trust Anecdotes Over Data?Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos kept his Amazon email open to the world.
  5. What Does Strategically Patient Mean to Jeff Bezos?Ethan Evans says "strategically patient, tactically impatient" was a Jeff Bezos idea. Important things take a long time.
  6. Why Do High Performers Feel Bad at Amazon?Ethan Evans says Amazon talked about the hours in euphemisms. Jeff Bezos's line was that he did not like "work-life balance." He preferred "work-life harmony."
  7. How Much Did Ethan Evans Make at Amazon?Ethan Evans says his target pay in his last year at Amazon was $900,000. The stock usually did better than the target, so he tended to make a low $1 million.
  8. Did Jeff Bezos Want Amazon to Become a Bank?Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos always declined pitches to turn Amazon into a bank. People kept pitching finance because Bezos came from D. E.
  9. Who Invented Amazon Prime?Ethan Evans says two people claim Amazon Prime. Charlie Ward, then a principal engineer and later a VP, says he invented it.
  10. Why Does Amazon's Website Look Ugly?Sam Parr uses Amazon as the example of bad design beating good design. A fashionable designer thinks good design means colors and a flat layout.
  11. Who Did Jeff Bezos Quote About the Stock Market?Ethan Evans says the person Jeff Bezos quoted a lot was Benjamin Graham, the investor Warren Buffett also follows.

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