Amazon is a tremendous execution machine. It is somewhat puzzling how a behemoth like that can plow through new markets, innovate and build new flywheels. How are they doing it ? Are they the embodiment of a "lean startup" at mega scale ? What is the secret sauce ? Is there one ? The answer is yes, there is a secret sauce, and paradoxically, it goes against the grain of everything that the Silicon Valley echo chamber preaches.
More importantly, what can we learn about innovation by studying the execution playbook of a successful innovator like Amazon (if anything), and is the VC funding model appropriate for it?
The Amazonian ways
There is no "build an MVP, ship fast, measure and validate, iterate, stay efficient." Amazon aims for a Minimum Lovable Product. Where others "measure and validate," Amazon "dives deep" and "invents and simplifies." Amazon is "customer obsessed"—at the expense of efficiency. While I doubt the opposition to Silicon Valley dogma is deliberate, Amazon flips the iterative execution paradigm: start with an uncompromising vision, then figure out how to execute it—not the other way around.
1) MLP vs. MVP
At Amazon, we don’t try to prove an idea is viable; we try to delight the customer. You can’t beta-test your way into a truly groundbreaking product—you need vision. MVP thinking strips anything that threatens viability. MLP thinking asks what we can add to make the experience unmistakably great.
When the first Kindle was built, Jeff Bezos insisted on cellular connectivity even though the accepted pattern was syncing via a PC. An MVP would have cut wireless. Wireless was the riskiest piece and could have sunk the program. It stayed anyway, because the vision required it.
This is the opposite of hypothesis-testing your way to a product. Customers shouldn’t carry the burden of our viability experiments. Our job is to innovate on their behalf, not hand them half-baked ideas.
2) “Measure and validate” vs. “dive deep” and “invent and simplify”
Every product starts with a crisp vision, ruthless execution, and good judgment. Instead of “ship quick and fail fast,” we “insist on the highest standards.” Instead of “incorporate user feedback,” we “invent and simplify.” Instead of “iterate,” we “dive deep.” We focus on inputs we control to solve the customer problem, not just outputs.
Intellectual rigor is paramount, and the way it gets catalyzed is through a writing-first process best exemplified by the PRFAQ - a well-known process that can be brutally nitpicky. A good PRFAQ requires clarity of thought, which gets continuously sharpened by rewriting and debating every single aspect of the user experience. A similar writing culture applies to technical designs, security reviews, and operational readiness. The bar is incredibly high.
3) Speed vs. quality
Quality is non-negotiable, but it doesn’t have to slow you down. The one-way door vs. two-way door framework keeps decisions fast when they’re reversible and careful when they aren’t. “Disagree and commit” turns debate into forward motion.
We still run segments, VOC, user studies, alphas/betas, and A/B tests. They’re tools for refinement, not for steering the product away from its vision. A/B tests pick the button that converts better; CSAT confirms the app worked as intended. Occasionally data exposes an outlier that deserves a strong response, but the vision doesn’t swing with every experiment. We don’t “find” product-market fit; we forge it. As Jeff Bezos likes to point out, when the data and the anecdotes disagree, trust the anecdotes.
4) Nimble at scale
A common argument for “lean” is that shared components and tight efficiency keep you fast. I thought so too. When our team grew from 10 to 100, I pushed hard on shared infrastructure and libraries to boost reuse across sub-teams. It slowed us down. Growth got gated by the slowest dependency.
The Amazon answer is counterintuitive: in the short term, even teams building similar things should often duplicate. Coordination costs and external interfaces drag more than duplication does. At Amazon’s scale, any service might serve millions, and the engineering bar is high; duplication feels expensive. What actually kills products is being late and getting bogged down. Duplication is an investment in speed you can consolidate later. You can fix organizational and technical inefficiencies; you can’t buy back time with customers you failed to delight.
But..but what about me - a scrappy startup?
What does this all say about the generally accepted operating cadence for startups ? A resource-restricted world - in which meeting a specific milestone ahead of a funding round can be life or death - is not so conducive to operating with such rigor and dedication to the vision. Or, is it?
The iterative nature of execution in the start-up world is heavily predicated on information asymmetry. A new market may present itself with tons of information gaps that can only be filled by throwing product at users and eliciting behavior. If that is your model of the world, speed and cost efficiency are, without doubt, essential. At the same time, how many products are truly new in the behavioral sense of the word? The internet has been around for a while, users are comfortable with digital products and a lot of them can't remember a world without internet access on their mobile devices. Perhaps key to choosing your strategy is understanding this delineation and choosing where your product falls on the spectrum. When you’re actually inventing, vision matters more than velocity theater.
Therein lies the billion dollar question: can you invent as a resource constrained startup? Or are you mostly subject to hard, physical realities dictated by the capital access and its "patience" ?
Culture moves like fashion, and Silicon Valley isn’t immune. You won’t win an argument with a VC about the “right” way to build. To paraphrase Benjamin Graham, the dominant culture is a voting machine in the short term, but in the long term, it is a weighing machine. It is hard to imagine that quick iteration and information elicitation is a durable tactic. What does endure is craft, vision, and the timeless rules of customer choice. If you’re looking for an alternative to lean orthodoxy, here’s a live data point: Amazon commits to a strong vision, sets a high bar, duplicates when it buys speed, and forges product-market fit. It’s another way to build—and it works.