I spent 6.5 of my most formidable years working at Amazon. Some thoughts on my experience.

I'll never forget the moment I received my internship offer. I was in between classes and went into our computer lab to do some work. My phone battery was low, so I plugged it into a lab computer. I had a little keychain charger with a short cable, so my phone rested upside down from the front panel of the Dell workstation. I was in the middle of some work when my phone lit up with a Gmail notification. Phone still upside down, I glanced at the subject line: "Congrats from Amazon!" I grabbed my phone, ran out of the lab, and called my Dad.

That summer was one of the best of my life. I made some lifelong friends, explored the PNW, and got to work on a project that had me waking up with excitement each morning. In fact my first day was Demo Day in my org -- I sat there watching demos of new Alexa features and had to pinch myself.

Things became a little more real once I joined as full-time employee. I moved into an apartment by myself in Seattle, and it was time to be an "adult" with disposable time and income. After the honeymoon phase passed, I began feeling a confluence of things: imposter syndrome and existentialism. Growing up, there was always something to chase: get into a good college, get a good internship, get a good job. Well I had gotten the good job, now what? And what exactly did I do to deserve this?

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{Seinfeld voice} At Amazon there's a lot of talk about "the bar" -- there's a "high bar", you have to "raise the bar" -- what's the deal with that?

One of the bars is for hiring. Amazon hires smart people and as a fresh grad I was intimidated by the "10x engineers" from big name schools. All I had done to be there was one online assessment and a phone screen (ofc my negative brain would exclude the successful internship). To combat this, I spent a lot of extra time on weekends trying to "catch up." Outside of that, I was also unsure what to do with all the time. Not just the immediately available free evenings and weekends, but what about the rest of my life? Am I going to be doing this same 9-5 for the next 40 years? These are standard experiences for folks in their 20s; I just had to go through the motions, and I'm grateful I was able to go through this period of personal and career development at Amazon.

Amazon is successful for a reason, I believe its best invention is its set of leadership principles. As corny as they seem on face value, and though much has been said about Amazon's culture, I truly believe it's great. These principles provide a common language that cuts across teams, job functions, biases from previous experiences, and aligns every employee to company's mission. I learned many 'hard' skills in my time -- software development best practices, operational excellence, stakeholder management, roadmap prioritization, data driven decision-making -- but this leadership principles driven culture building is what I will carry forward most intentionally through my career.

My favorite LPs and other cultural tidbits:

1. Customer obsession: Always work backwards from the customer needs. This prevents scope creep and keeps you focused on what's ultimately important. In the long run, customers will reward you with ways to make your business sustainable.
2. Bias for Action: Move quickly through 2-way door decisions, and deliberate on 1-way door decisions. Let data lead the way, but gut check against anecdotes.
3. Frugality: Be scrappy. Working against my tendencies, you don't need a perfectly optimized solution, you need the minimum that customers will love you for.
4. Document Driven Meetings: Writing forces you to clarify your thinking, while also providing the space to display your argument. On the flip side, active reading forces the audience to actively engage with the material (vs passive listening presentation), allowing readers to follow lines of thought and scrutinize provided data. This drives deeper and more engaged discussions, and leads to better informed decisions.
5. "It's Day 1": The above sum up to a "Day 1" culture, which is about being experimental, nimble, and doing more with less.

This recipe is what has enabled Amazon to repeatedly find success in various business units led by different people. It's still Day 1.