Early in my Amazon career, I made a common management mistake—I spent too much time on small decisions and very little time on big ones. Small decisions are much easier to make than big decisions. They give leaders the illusion of productivity because it feels better to make more decisions per unit of time.
But high levels of activity do not necessarily produce better results. Big, challenging bets are what fundamentally changed Amazon, not little actions.
In my first few years, my team and I maintained a spreadsheet with a long list of retail merchandising features we wanted to add to our website, like buy-one-get-one-free, discounts for bundles, etc.
At the time, these seemed critical to unlocking growth and matching the capabilities of brick-and-mortar retailers who were outselling us. Those things brought in some extra revenue, which was great, but none of them fundamentally changed the business.
Basically, Amazon didn’t become Amazon because of a BOGO feature.
What blew Amazon through the roof were the big bets: building Prime, creating Kindle, launching AWS. These were decisions with real stakes. They were hard, risky, and they took years to pay off. But, they made all the difference between what Amazon was then and what Amazon is now.
When I coach leaders now, I ask, “If this project goes well, what’s the upside? A million dollars? Ten million? A hundred million?”
The estimates will always be wrong, but the order of magnitude tells you where to focus. If everything on your roadmap caps out at a 1% impact, then you’ll get 1% growth at best. If you want 10x, you need to make 10x bets.
The challenge is that big decisions are hard. They require risk, investment of scarce resources, long-term thinking, and sustained effort. They don’t come with short-term gratification. It feels like nothing’s happening for months or even years.
The job of an executive is to make a few big, high-quality decisions each year and drive their execution. This is what will define the success of the business. Spending most of your time on small things feels productive in the moment, but it is actually the best way to make sure the business stagnates in the long run.
