Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

- 1 minutes read - 207 words

Amazon’s Leadership Principles are used in everything from hiring to design reviews, and they’ve become hugely influential well beyond Amazon itself.

Watch a walkthrough of the principles on YouTube →

The fourteen principles:

  1. Customer Obsession
  2. Ownership
  3. Invent and Simplify
  4. Are Right, A Lot
  5. Learn and Be Curious
  6. Hire and Develop the Best
  7. Insist on the Highest Standards
  8. Think Big
  9. Bias for Action
  10. Frugality
  11. Earn Trust
  12. Dive Deep
  13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
  14. Deliver Results

(Amazon has since added two more - “Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer” and “Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility” - bringing the total to sixteen.)

A few of these land especially close to home for anyone doing DevOps or SRE work. Ownership - “you build it, you run it” - is the founding idea of modern operations. Dive Deep is exactly the mindset an incident investigation demands: stay close to the detail, audit the metrics, don’t accept a hand-wavy root cause. And Insist on the Highest Standards is what separates a system that merely works in a demo from one you’d trust in production at 3am.

You don’t have to work at Amazon to find these useful - they’re a good lens for thinking about how any engineering team holds itself accountable.

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