Ibrahim Bashir, Director of Engineering, Twitter: Creating enduring innovation!

Good morning everybody. I'm Ibrahim Bashir. I'm here to talk to you today about building a billion dollar culture. And I want to take a second and define what it means to have a billion dollar culture. I think a lot of you have probably built things and shipped things that are very successful products, apps, businesses. But when I say a billion dollar culture, I'm talking about a company and an environment that is regularly releasing products that are hugely successful to the point that it's almost a self perpetuating machine. And the best way to define a billion dollar culture is to contrast it against one that is not. And the key there is repeatability. So you have the challenge of building, you have the thrill of shipping, and then we all face the question of repeating. And what I want to talk to you today is how do you craft a culture that regularly repeats? I want to, as a backdrop, talk about a story that I haven't told before. It is about the first Kindle Fire tablet. It is the journey of that idea to getting it out the door and ultimately creating a billion dollar business around hardware, software, apps, content, video, music, and the process of doing that and what I learned along the way. So as a general backdrop, as I go through my presentation today, we'll talk about that. So the first step when you're building something is to think long term. And what I mean by long term, I want people to understand the horizon in terms of time. It's not just ideas in terms of impact or utility, but it's really about how far reaching your vision really is. And the further out you can have it, the better. And the vision has to be articulated in a way that, that it actually inspires not only your users and your potential customers, but it actually has to inspire your internal people, your company, into doing their best work. And so the vision statement that we had for this original Kindle tablet, it was very simply a 7 inch tablet for the masses. That was it. 7 inch tablet for the masses. And if you were doing something that was part of that vision, then you should keep doing it. And if it didn't fit with that vision, then we weren't going to keep doing it. And I'll let you in on a secret that a lot of people don't know is that was not the first attempt to do a 7 inch tablet and it was not the only parallel attempt to do a tablet. So there was multiple initiatives going on previously and in concert to do similar tablets at Amazon. So why was that one successful? And so one idea, when you're building is you should always be ready to build. You may have the assets and the tools, but the timing may not be right. But when the timing is right, you should not hesitate. And the other thing to keep in mind is not everything is building from scratch. Not everything is an original idea. A lot of very successful products are just the composition of existing ideas packaged in new ways. What I mean by that is my job as the person driving the release of this product was made easier because Amazon already had a Kindle reader. Amazon already had a digital music business. Amazon was already working on an Android app for video. So putting all these things together in a unique package, yes, it was a brand new product, but it was repackaging in a lot of different ways. And then the last thing you can do in terms of vision is to articulate it in a way that people can really absorb it in their DNA. I can't tell you how many times every discussion and every argument and every trade off and every debate ended with, hey, we're all trying to build a 7 inch tablet for the masses, right? And so your team really has to absorb the ambition and the breadth of what you're trying to do. And speaking of your team, the biggest thing you can do to set them up for success is to diversify them. And diversity is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days. But I want to be very specific here. In hindsight now with the Kindle Fire sort of being an Entire family of 6 inch kids tablets, 7 inch product, a high end product, a 9 inch video device, tons of content purchased and shared. In hindsight it says, oh, that was obviously going to be successful. But let me tell you about the team that originally came together. The head of product was from the newspaper business, physical newspaper business, never had sold digital content in his life. The engineering leader that we worked with came from Amazon's ordering business selling goods on Amazon.com or Amazon.de Building technology to enable e commerce. Nothing to do with devices or digital content or anything of the like. Our quality person had been working on shipping quality apps for iOS. And let me tell you, there's a big difference on hitting submit to an app on the app Store and actually sending a physical device to customers that you cannot take back, right? That's a big difference in terms of what you're shipping. And lastly, there was me tasked with launching this thing and I, for those of you who have looked me up, have a consulting background, I don't know anything about devices and this was my first attempt to do something like that. So on Paper, this team really doesn't have a chance. Right? But the thing about diversity is if you put people together who have shown promise and have solved problems and give them a new problem, they will actually solve it in a unique way and in a non traditional way and in an innovative way. And so that's why it's very, very important for you to actually create some diversity within your team. And I want to do the traditional speaker thing here and bust out a Steve Jobs quote, which is the more people have diversity of experience, the more unique you're going to get solutions, right? And so when you feel like your team has sort of hit a wall or is not thinking of new ways to solve the problems, ask yourself if you've given them enough diversity to work with. The second aspect is when your company is building something and shipping something, the full firepower of your company should be on display. And one of the anti patterns that I've seen in a lot of industries is you give the assignment to a particular group of people and that group of people is put in a box and they're actually competing with everybody else in the company. There is really only a fraction of your company is trying to solve the problem. So in some ways your user, your customer, is not getting the full benefit of it. And the way to solve that problem is to find owners. There's a lot of objective ways to find this, and I can talk about it afterwards or it's a separate conversation, but you want to find people who essentially people always say, hey, that person doesn't really care what team they're on, they just go get things done. You want to find people like that because those are the people who will stitch together a lot of different ideas from across your company and ship them to your users. So you want to blur the organizational boundaries. The second thing is you want to look for people that I call multipliers. The subjective way that I've seen this is there's always the team within the company where you say, you know, they've got five people on that team, but it seems like they have 50. Somehow they do the work of many, many more people. Or you hire somebody and you say, you know, as soon as we hired this person, this guy or this girl, we just started doing a lot more stuff. So there's objective ways to find that. But you want to have those kinds of people on your team because they will amplify what you're actually able to do. So if you have big ideas, you're thinking long term, and you've created diversity in your team. You're going to succeed, right? Not exactly. You are going to fail. And I'm going to tell you something that probably is a little bit counterintuitive, but not only are you going to fail, but failure is important. Failure is a type of learning that you just are not ready to understand yet. And given time, you will. And your jobs as leaders, and I imagine all of you have high positions in your companies, is not only to enable failure, but to actually make it cheap. So your job is not to punish failure or penalize failure or avoid failure. Your job is actually to enable people to fail, to enable people to learn and to do it regularly and cheaply. That's the best thing you can do for your team as a leader. And going back to the horizon with which you plan, when you think very small term, when you think in terms of weeks and quarters and months, you are going to think small and, and you're going to fail small. And there's really not much you can do with a small failure. That's all it is, it's a small failure. But when you think big, you will have big failures. And I know that sounds terrible, but a big failure is not just a big failure. A big failure is a series of small successes and small failures. And the thing about small successes is you can ship them. And that brings me to my next point in this is we're all trying to ship something, we're all trying to get something out the door. It's not just a science experiment, right? And so the first key is you have to get something out the door. I don't know how many times I've seen people sort of iterate and iterate and iterate and try to get it to perfect, but that is not the point. The point is actually to get it in the hands of your customers, to actually make money off of it, right? And the best thing you can do is, once you start thinking of shipping as a way of just experimenting, is to make it really easy for people to get things out the door, enable experimentation. And one of the big reasons you want to get it out the door is you want feedback. You want your customer to tell you, yes, I think this is a great product, or I think this is what's missing and this is how it could become a great product. Right? When it's just you in isolation, it's very hard for you to know whether it's going to be successful or not. So feedback is super valuable. And going back to the original Kindle, I think a lot of people focus on. Oh yeah, I remember that because Jeff Bezos was on stage and he pulled back a curtain and there it was perfect, right? Or I saw Steve Jobs or Tim Cook on stage and he unveiled it and it was perfect. What people don't realize is the hours and hours of testing and feedback that go into something like this. And when you have so much secrecy shrouding a project of these types, of these devices, how do you actually get feedback from people without it leaking? And so my team actually ran three distinct things for the Kindle so that we could have thousands of hours of feedback and there would be nothing that we would learn. That was a surprise to us. The first was what we like to call beta. So you find people within the company who are passionate about the product, you give them the product and then you let them just play away as an end user and you gather all the feedback you can, you work out all the kinks. The second thing was what we call friends and family, which is friends and family of employees who are willing to sign a non disclosure and use the product. And they had no vested interest in the success of the product. They were just casual users. And then the third thing was what we called Playtime, which is you actually lock people in a room and say, just use this device for hours like a child would, right? Watch a video, listen to music, go to the browser, open an app, play Angry Birds, close this window. And that's almost like a stress test. And these are things that normal QA and normal testing and normal automation cannot accomplish for you. They're almost in the wild type testing. So feedback is valuable. Any mechanisms you can create within your company to make it easier to get and act on feedback is super valuable. And one of the things I want everybody to keep in mind is it just has to be usable. It doesn't have to be perfect. And just because it's perfect doesn't actually mean it's usable. So keep that in mind when you're worrying about feedback. The second thing you have to do in terms of shipping is think of shipping as curation. It's you editing the product before it goes out the door, right? And the thing to keep in mind is when your customer sees your product, what they see is just as important as what they don't see. All the features that you decided to cut, all the features that you didn't add, all the things that will come in the next release, all of the decisions and trade offs that went into it, those define your product. That negative space defines it. Just as much as the physical end result. So you have to keep that in mind. And the hardest decisions when it comes to cutting have to be based on data. You basically have to think very carefully about what you're doing and once it is decided, you have to do it and you cannot look back. But in industry, I've seen the opposite. What I've actually seen is not a whole lot of thinking in terms of what you're doing and why you're doing it, and then taking a long time to implement the decision, which actually leads to noise and turmoil and drama. And the biggest example I can give you of this is going back to the original, the Kindle tablet that I was talking about. It was a 7 inch tablet for the masses. And early on in the planning we said, we must have music, we must have video, we must have a browser. And there was a team that said, you know, we can build Docs technology. And what I mean by docs is you can open up a Microsoft word doc or PowerPoint or PDF, you can view it, you can edit it, you can share it, you can email it. And they started building all this technology and it sounded like a great idea. It said, this is a great feature, go do your thing. At a certain point this team came to us and said, we've hit some delays and we're close, but it's not quite finished. So we would like to delay the release of the product to have this finished. And these are very hard decisions, very hard conversations, because there's a lot of sweat equity that has gone into it and it's unfair to just cut it out. And going back to what I said earlier about having a very clear vision that the entire team understands, we said to ourselves, if we have a 7 inch tablet for the masses, is having Docs functionality essential? And the answer was, no, it's not essential. And so not only did we say, we're not waiting for this, we're going to cut this feature, we actually took all their engineers and said, you're going to work on quality problems for what is a necessity. And that is a big difference in a billion dollar culture. In a normal company, that is a big political mess. When you say, hey, this team is going to work on this and you can no longer do what you were doing. But in a billion dollar culture, you focus on what's right for the user. And the reality is the users don't care about your. Org structure. The users don't care that a feature was included to please a particular VP or a user was not Included because of a particular, particular person's opinion. Users just care about the quality of what they get. And this was after the fact. But it's very gratifying to see people in the press say, hey, I can't tell the organizational structure from this product, which is a good thing, right? Nobody needs to know who reports to whom or what the org tree looks like internally. And then the last thing I can tell you in terms of shipping is you should really be shipping end to end customer experiences. What I mean by that is if you look at any popular product today and you go to the website, Kindle, iPhone, iPad, everything you read is like marketing gobbledygook. The weight of it, the screen size, the quality, the resolution, none of those are problems that need to be solved. They're just marketing speak. When you look at a Kindle, what you've actually solved is a person thinks of a book, searches for the book, buys the book, and in 60 seconds has the book and is reading the book. You have solved the problem from beginning to end for the user. And so your product should just have a list of end to end problems that you're solving. And everything else is just marketing speed. So if you ever see yourself solving a piece of the problem, try to solve all of it. And if it's not within your capacity to solve all of it, then don't spend time solving that problem. And the thing I want you to keep in mind is there's a lot of obsession about customers, and rightly so. Customers are what you should focus on, but not in the way you think. Yes, you should have customer empathy and you should put on that consumer mindset. But you can fall into a trap when you start obsessing about the customer you know, because the customer you know today may not be your customer of tomorrow, it may not be your future customer. And hopefully my Swiss friends in the audience understand this, which is if you just focus on building great products, your customers will find you. The strangest people will start using your product without you intending it to be so. And so there's two things I'd love to tell you about customers. One is you are not your customer. There's a difference between empathizing with your customer and confusing yourself with your customer. So don't build things just for yourself. That's narcissistic. And then the other thing is, don't pay attention to your competition because they're just as clueless in terms of what the customer wants. So focus on the customer, but not yourself and not your competition. In The Amazon group, we had a saying called Customer zero. And it's a very good mindset to have when you're building user facing products because it basically means think of the first person doing any action. Think of the first person that clicks buy. Think of the first person that gets the package in the mail. Think of the first person that unwraps it, that turns it on, that registers it, that buys a book, that watches a movie. And if you think of that first person and you think of the experience they're having, you're not going to go wrong. So that brings me to the last point. You're following all these traits. How do you actually repeat, how do you actually create a culture where you're doing this regularly? And the common thread is people. If you think of the types of cultures I'm talking about, an IBM, a General Electric, companies that have been around and will be around for hundreds of years, the common thread is people. Nobody says, hey, I would really love to work for this company. I hear they have a great process. Or I really like this company. I've heard their, it is amazing. They say, I really want to work for this company because really great people work at this company, right? Culture is made up of people and perpetuated by people. So people are the ticket in terms of creating a culture like this, this internally they help you recruit other talent, externally, they are your brand. So focus on people. And you want to get your culture to a point where they are carrying the culture forward and you don't have any control. And I think control is an interesting topic because a lot of times as leaders we see our job as to enforce the culture, but the reality is the culture should be self enforcing, it should be self perpetuating. And you really want to empower your people to the point where they are doing it for themselves. The second trick to repeating is to design platforms whenever possible. If you can solve a problem, an instance of a problem, or build a solution that will solve every future occurrence of that problem, you want to go for the platform. It is the smarter way to build things. It gives others the ability to build into your platform. And if you ever need to, it gives you the ability to change direction and pivot, right? And so platforms are key. So the last point I want to leave you with is I've been talking about all these characteristics that help you craft a billion dollar culture. And the thing I want to leave you with is there is no trick, There is no aha, yes, this is the magic solution to building such a culture. It is actually persistence and perseverance and repetitiveness. That's actually the key. Because when your mindset is about the user, when your thinking is long term, when your hiring is diverse and your experimentation is easy and your failure is treated as learning, then you realize your repeat of your next billion dollar product is actually already in progress. So I tricked you a little bit with the quote in the beginning. Yes, this is a direct quote, but I want to show you what the response was. When you have a billion dollar culture, you don't over celebrate what you just did. You expect to do the same thing again and again and again. So for those of you who are paying attention, my title is about, hey, I want to build something. And then you get excited when you ship it. Then you ask yourself, but how do I repeat? And that's really the wrong way to look at it. You should always be building, you should always be asking if this is something worthy of shipping and you should expect to repeat. So those are my thoughts. Thank you for listening. And hopefully there's a lot of culture change that comes out of this conference.