

What's it like to get a “?” email from Jeff Bezos? [video] - BrandonWatson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1RD-UDE0rQ
Hey HN: I&#x27;ve pulled together a video for one of the most common questions I get about Amazon: What&#x27;s it like to receive a question mark email from Jeff Bezos?<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=u1RD-UDE0rQ<p>I&#x27;ve never found any high quality info online for this topic save a few responses on a Quora thread. In the video I promise additional content, but I didn&#x27;t realize that YouTube had certain thresholds to be able to post a link off of YT to another site, so I am including the link here: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.interviewat.com&#x2F;pl&#x2F;195251 (it&#x27;s also in the video description text).<p>This is a good look at the process, deliverables, and outcomes when working at AMZN. For reference, I was the Director of Product Management for the Kindle sw platform. I probably handled no fewer than 10 question mark emails from Jeff over the 3 years I was there.
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simonebrunozzi
Ah, the "myth" of Jeff Bezos. I only "met" him twice, in the hallways of
PacMed, back when Amazon's workforce was so tiny compared to now.

I was at AWS, 2008-2014. In the early days, Bezos would frequently comment on
AWS-related stuff, such as daily EC2 revenues, etc.

Occasionally, despite I wasn't an executive back then, I would also be one of
the tens of email recipients that angry Amazon customers would use to shout
their anger at the company (because my public facing role of tech evangelist,
and my @simon Twitter handle).

I have to say, I don't think that Amazon's and Jeff's success has much to do
with a "?" email, or the ":)" email I saw a few times. These are simply a
shortcut for slightly longer sentences - "what do you say about this?", and
"Nice work! :)".

Jeff's success, in my view, is an amazing capacity to hire excellent people,
and being able to drive them to work crazy hours and feel like founders,
despite not having share ownership in accordance to their work. Most of them,
especially the early ones, are rich beyond any imagination. They could have
been richer, sure... But they could also not.

Also, the organizational structure at Amazon, with every team having to
provide APIs for their product, is also genius. AWS could have not happened
without that.

~~~
tinman25
I think you nailed it -that's why Amazon is a success..a culture where
brilliant people working crazy hours for little reward (now).. obv that gets
harder to translate when you have thousands of employees...

~~~
majkinetor
> Most of them, especially the early ones, are rich beyond any imagination.

Doesn't seem like they sleep on the street either. :)

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doopy-loopy2
Whenever I get passive aggressive or otherwise ambiguous emails like that I
just ignore it.

If it's important, they'll follow up.

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BrandonWatson
Yeah, I'm wish it were that simple with the Bezos emails. :)

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benatkin
It's simple if you've made the decision not to work for FAAMG.

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syntheticnature
So, no Netflix, and who's M?

~~~
corndoge
MongoDB

~~~
benatkin
Meteor

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motohagiography
Question I would have is, why didn't the product manager know that those
reviews mattered to his competitor's marketing team and CEO as a
differentiator, and why weren't those competitor features already tracked on
their roadmap?

This PM seems like an A-player, but he was caught flat footed, hence the "?"

The "?" email means you dropped a ball. If I were doing an armchair RCA on it,
I'd posit the problem was a disconnect in the relationship between Product and
Marketing, where marketing would have already known they were getting hammered
on reviews - and that they mattered - but Product was probably indexed on the
wrong stakeholders, likely in the engineering org given, a) that the PM could
code at all meant eng was still his comfort zone, and b) the focus on being
seen to ship a release. My read of it was he dropped the ball because he
backed the wrong horse and misunderstood the priorities of the company. Of
course you drop everything to fix it, you f'd up.

Unfortunately, just sending "?" emails to staff doesn't create the culture
where they are meaningful. Sending "?" messages doesn't make you Jeff Bezos.
I'd argue they are an artifact of a very specific local culture in AMZN. If
managers in other orgs imitated that aspect of it, thinking now they're doing
the real Bezo-ing, they would be just doing a cargo cult management ritual.

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colinplamondon
At this point in the App Store cycle, most app developers I know would
aggressively "review flush". It sounds like the OP wasn't familiar with the
growth strategies common at the time.

If your star average goes below 4.5, put out a quickie point release. That
would reset the reviews, and the review prompt would drive a 5 star instantly.

IIRC, I'd also divide all the users into buckets, and stage out review prompts
by week. You never want negative reviews stacked alongside each other in the
review list. Multiple negative reviews is the kiss of death for conversion -
rank drop could happen fast.

By staggering review prompts, you'd get positive reviews rolling in every
single week, with a surge up front.

Obviously, that doesn't mean _ignore_ the negative reviews. Those are
generally critical product failures. That necessitates response. We'd group
and measure review categories, and reach out to affected users to see how they
felt about potential and shipped solutions. Product quality is step one on
good reviews.

None of that means setting your business on fire because of negative reviews.
At the same time it's a critical signal to be dealt with, there's an immediate
business problem of minimizing or eliminating the impact of negative reviews.

They're two different swim lanes requiring two different processes.

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perl4ever
>You never want negative reviews stacked alongside each other

That's a funny thing to say, because as a user all I ever want from online
reviews is the negative reviews stacked together. Positive reviews are only
noise, in the way. The only question is what sort of negative reviews are
there?

Strategizing as you describe is depressing to me because it suggests the
public mostly uses reviews in the wrong way.

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abetlen
I think it's telling that his first hypothesis for why Barnes & Noble was
getting more positive reviews was that they were paying for them. Honestly, my
first thought was "maybe they're just asking more customers". I wonder if he
thought that the competitor was doing something shady _because_ he'd been put
on the spot and so his first response was instinctively the most defensive
one.

~~~
dpbriggs
He mentioned several times that asking for reviews wasn't common (in his
opinion) at the time, and so there's little else that could reasonably explain
the jump in review count.

~~~
abetlen
I agree that asking for reviews was a lot less common at the time (2012), but
he actually says "asking for reviews ... wasn't something that came to the
front of mind ... it felt dirty at the time". To me that reads like he was
aware it was something apps were doing but he wasn't comfortable with it. So
when the CEO of the company asked him "why aren't we higher rated in the app
store?" he probably wished the answer was "they're cheating" instead of
"because I feel it's unethical to ask for reviews".

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jacknews
To be honest, I think the world has bigger problems than "why is our kindle
app not getting the most app-store reviews and stars".

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bagacrap
which is perhaps why the email subject only got a single character

~~~
jacknews
But it caused a team of apparently quite talented people to 'drop everything'
and scurry for an answer.

Of course this kind of this kind of thing is important to individual
businesses and needs to be done, it's just a shame to see "The Best Minds of
My Generation Are Thinking About How To Make People Click Ads"

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Traster
This sort of ridiculous time pressure on a question that's basically of almost
no importance seems unnecessary. It makes me think the culture around this is
completely broken. It's also notable that they dropped everything, panicked,
and triaged for 48 hours (which I presume is his way of saying that he has no
respect for any of his teams' personal lives) for something which has no
urgency _other_ than who is asking the question. Then having completely
interrupted everyone's jobs for 48 hours, they then go on to completely
refocus the team for 2 _weeks_ looking at why Barnes & Noble must be cheating.

And how does it all resolve? Oh right, the B&N App is pretty good, and they
ask their users for reviews. Which the Kindle team would know if any of them
had bothered to pay attention to what their competition is doing in the first
place. Notice how the original point was that the B&N App had more _better_
reviews? And how the solution was not to build a better Kindle App - it was to
juice the metrics.

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tinman25
Ironic that this is about reviews of a product on an app store given Amazons
legacy on product reviews...

Brandon here gives a great overview of his experience here. but I'm sorry that
so many intelligent people have to be bootlickers to CEO whims and that we
inculcate that lesson for our new hires and new engineers. (ie the CEO is
'GOD')

Of course a CEO gets to dictate policy..but if it happens on a whim or for
certain empathy deficient folks like Bezos after another CEO eggs him on..

To me a decent work life balance is paramount..but ambitious people have other
priorities -Life's to short to waste your weekend analyzing app store review
data esp if you or your team of engineers is busy doing what the company wants
in the first place.

Bezos, Musk, Jobs, Gates or our own CEO we drink the corporate kool-aid and
keep worshiping these guys.. at what cost?

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BrandoElFollito
It means that the sender is either illiterate, or that his time is to precious
to spend on inferior creatures like us, aka an asshole.

I really do not get this religious approach to other pepole.

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zzleeper
> for the Kindle sw platform

Dang! As I understood, were you guys one of the teams with the craziest work
hours over there?

How did you handle the work-life balance?

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robofanatic
This is a typical middle manager mentality of treating CEO as a messenger of
God.

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nvr219
!

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grzm
This isn't really a Show HN

> _" Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN
> users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread."_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

It's probably better posting either the video itself as a submission.

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rvz
Right. rich person sends email to another person.

Not sure why this person is giggling and feeling excited about this in the
video. The sender doesn't care, I don't care, Who cares.

Move along now nothing to see here.

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phone8675309
The cult of Bezos continues to wreak havoc on localities and workers.

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martopix
?

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par
I still can't downvote on HN but if I could, i'd downvote this.

~~~
hbogert
I think it's pretty brave telling the world that you didn't think about a
problem with common knowledge and went full engineer on this. I mean, I think
at least 10% of us here could've hypothesized that they might be asking the
user for a review. Even if that was not-done at that time, they should've just
used the b&n app from the beginning and not after the multiple days of
escalation.

Probably all due to the stifling effect of a single character email

I do get it though, in my own company we constantly compare ourselves to the
competitor, but we never actually do a competitor analysis, it's like we're
scared or something to use their product.

