Definition
Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.
Explained by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy
You could argue that there is a bit of tension between the strategic part of think big and the detail orientation of dive deep. And oftentimes people will say, well, which do you want, you know, do you want the strategic part or do you want the detail part? And the answer, of course, is yes, we want both.
Amazon is unique from other companies in that we expect our people to not only be strategic, but to be willing to roll up their sleeves and be great at getting into the details.
There are so many people who can fill up loads of whiteboards around office rooms with great ideas, but who don’t know how to get the details of those ideas right. And the reality is that the details of any idea are what matters most. That’s what people actually see, what customers actually see.
It’s part of by the way, why the narrative format that we write papers and communicate in and working backwards documents are so useful because it’s—you know, whereas in a PowerPoint, you can speak at a super high level and you don’t have to get into the details—it is hard to fake the details in a narrative. And getting the details right really matters. Every product, every business that I have ever been a part of or seen in Amazon has been made or broken by how great we were at getting the details right for customers.
Good leaders find mechanisms to inspect and audit the details and to understand anecdotes and the right teams understand that the leaders who are looking at what they’re doing and working with them on the details, are doing so to help them be right a lot and achieve great results for customers.
And then the other piece is that with anecdotes, there are oftentimes, especially at our size, where you have these big metrics. I’ll take an example if you ever look at operational performance metrics, things like performance against service level agreements or error rates or latency. They’re measured across really large numbers and they can look perfectly reasonable. And then when you actually get into the details of it, you find, well, you hear this anecdote that this customer was unhappy about something or you have a friend who told you that this didn’t work out for them or you get an email from a customer who says, why is this the case? And when you actually follow those anecdotes, you find that there actually is a problem that may not be showing up in the broader metric because we cover so many people, they don’t register in the metric. But at our scale, even a 1% impact or a half a percent impact, is millions of people. So follow the anecdotes, inspect the details because it’s where you often find the real issues that could impact customers.