Definition
Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.
Explained by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy
I intentionally wanted to end with this leadership principle because you can get everything else that we’ve talked about right. You can be customer obsessed, you can be right a lot, you can be inventive, you can be strategic and think big, you can dive deep, you can be speedy, you can have the right ownership, you can hire the right teams. And the reality is if you fail on delivering, none of it matters.
Where the rubber meets the road for customers is what you actually deliver for them.
And there are two macro forms of delivery. There are outputs and there are inputs. Outputs are really high-level metrics. The ultimate output for a public company is your stock price. Other outputs are things like free cash flow or your revenue or your operating margin. But it’s very difficult to manage the outputs actively.
And I remember, earlier in my career I had a manager and I would sometimes go visit that manager and he had an office, a small office it was completely dark except for the light, the glow from his monitor. And I would sometimes go to visit him and I would walk by and I’d see him go, “Oh!” And I’d say, “what happened?” And he’d say, “well, I was looking at daily sales and we just went from being up 0.5 of 1% year over year to being down 0.71% year over year.” And I always thought that was so odd. I said, “well, can you actively affect that by looking at the monitor?” And he said “no, but it’s really important.”
And of course, it’s important because if you don’t have the right outputs for the business, then you don’t really have a business. But you cannot really actively manage the outputs. What drives the outputs are the inputs. Those are the actual initiatives that we’re all pursuing to change the customer experience in the business.
And that’s what, if you look at almost all our key accomplishments that we focus on as teams and across the S-team, they’re almost exclusively inputs because that’s what can make a difference.
I’ll say one last thing about delivery that I often see people get wrong, which is there’s so much work that goes into delivery. You have to define a product, you have a working backwards document, you make several versions of that working backwards document. You have to hire a team. There are all sorts of changes along the way as you get into actually building the product and implementing it. That when you get to delivery and you get to launch, people take this deep breath and they kind of feel like they’re done.
And the reality is that launch, or delivery, is not the finish line. It’s the starting line. It actually gets you to the starting point where you have something that you can actually build and make something meaningful out of. Very few of any things I’ve ever seen be successful at Amazon have launched with an initial launch and all of a sudden become big breakaway hits.
You always have to launch, you have to see what customers react to. You have to get feedback from customers and you have to iterate. And the very best companies and the very best teams are fast and organized about launching, but then they’re constantly iterating.
That’s how you get, you get 7, 8, 9 launches, where you’re iterating quickly, and all of a sudden you wake up and you realize I have something really meaningful that matters to customers. That’s what delivery looks like.