Editor’s note: This excerpt is from chapter three of the book The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World’s Most Disruptive Company, by John Rossman, the former director of merchant integration at Amazon.

John Rossman
John Rossman

In the world of business, the term platform has come to refer to a state in which machines interact seamlessly to knit together complex processes and tasks performed by various parties. Amazon.com is a platform.

It could have stopped at selling books—the “books platform”—but instead it has cascaded its scope of service to all forms of consumer items, and even to the enterprise itself.

My time at Amazon.com made me a big believer in the power of process automation to make workflows simpler and more productive. When a process is automated, it’s not only easier to scale but also simpler to measure; while manual effort, even when it begins at a seemingly insignificant level, can evolve into an expensive, non-scalable, and non-real-time capability.

That is why automation, algorithms, and technology architecture are the engines behind game-changing platform businesses such as Kindle, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Third-Party Sellers, Fulfillment by Amazon, and Amazon Web Services.

Amazon.com’s business platforms are enablers. They enable writers and booksellers. They enable people who want to sell to Amazon.com’s community. They enable businesses looking to outsource labor. They enable people and companies that want to use Amazon’s technology and computing capacity. They enable smaller organizations to enhance their reputations by piggybacking on that of Amazon.com.

By empowering entrepreneurs, they enable personal and professional growth for thousands of individuals. Amazon.com’s business platforms build virtuous cycles that circulate and expand energy in much the same way as the Amazon flywheel itself.

amazon-way11So if you want to understand how Amazon.com thinks about the principle of invent and simplify, you need to understand the platform opportunity.

As we’ve noted, technology makes the platform possible. But algorithms, automation, workflow, and technology are only part of how Amazon is inventing and simplifying. More important is the fact that capabilities are designed from the user backwards.

When we were building the third-party selling business at Amazon.com, creating a great experience for the seller was our goal. Building a simple seller registration process was difficult but essential to achieving that goal, and my job was to push engineering teams to integrate more than 40 different underlying systems to create a seamless and simple workflow for that process.

Willingness to rethink policies, rules, and other assumptions that are widely accepted in the business world is critical. So is asking and answering the question,

“If I had to completely automate the process and eliminate all manual steps, how would I design it?” Instead of aiming for a ten-percent reduction in friction, push a much more radical rethinking of assumptions; ask “the five whys” (see Chapter 12, “Dive Deep”), and have the willingness to challenge the status quo.

This is where all types of resistance, both active and passive, will be experienced, requiring a response from strong executive leadership. Some jobs will be changed, others will be eliminated. For all these reasons, it takes vision, creativity, desire, and courage to carry out the invent-and-simplify principle.

Previously: Former Amazon employee who survived Bezos tirade: New book captures ‘fierce competition’ and ‘demanding environment’

John Rossman is the author of “The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles of the World’s Most Disruptive Company.” Rossman is the former director of merchant integration at Amazon. He now serves as a managing director at consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal. You can follow his blog, On-AMZN, here, or follow him on Twitter @johnerossman.

Like what you're reading? Subscribe to GeekWire's free newsletters to catch every headline

Job Listings on GeekWork

Find more jobs on GeekWork. Employers, post a job here.