How Senior Leaders Evaluate Ideas — And a Story of Amazon's 3-Year Planning Process
Ideas are valuable if they're not simply a desired outcome. A path to an outcome is the core element of a good idea.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
As with many articles, this came as an idea from a reader. The idea lined up with an article I was thinking about, so I ran with it.
If you're open to reader questions, would you please consider a post on what goes through a director's (or senior leader's) mind when evaluating ideas?
My challenge is that I'm only able to truly innovate within my own space, whereas a more senior leader is looking at a much larger scope. I want to learn the questions I should ask myself as I'm evaluating or pitching ideas, and I'm sure you'd have a lot of actionable insights on this topic.
One of my most memorable (and disappointing, which I’ll get to later) times at Amazon was where I was asked to run the 3-year planning process. I was a Senior Manager in a large Amazon organization, and so it would entail coordinating input and ideas from dozens of teams. And I wish we’d had this article back then.
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What is the 3-year planning process?
For context, the goal of the 3-year planning process was to outline what large things the organization would accomplish over the next 3-year period. The idea was to paint a picture of what the organization would look like in an optimistic 3-years from now in a 6-page document.
“In 3-years, Alexa will be sentient. Due to the improvements in data processing and bandwidth, Alexa will control devices from cars to spaceships.”
Ok, perhaps that’s over the top, but the idea is that you paint a picture of what the future of your organization will look like from the customer and system perspective. Then you can work backwards to explain how you will get there, primarily through the OP1 system.
Amazon’s OP1 process (the famous planning process Amazon uses to plan across the entire company) is a year-by-year process. You say, “Over the next 10ish months, here’s what we’re going to do…” - which works well, except if you’re trying to do something huge. Which is why the 3-year planning process is a great way to give the longer-term vision for the shorter term work you’re about to do.
Imagine that you’re trying to get Project Kuiper approved. If you simply wrote a standard OP1 document, you’d say something like, “Over the next 10 months, we’ll come up with satellite designs, and build the beginnings of routing software.” Boring, right? And not inspiring. But perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t address the “Why” behind the work you’re doing. Why should we invest in building these things with value this year?
Why 3-year planning is important.
As a digression, the need for a long-term vision is super obvious with something like Project Kuiper, where you need to explain the long-term value. But it’s still critical to explain the long-term vision for your organization when prioritizing other projects. Let’s say you’re building AWS for example, and you’re deciding between building S3, and Lambda. S3 is a basic storage service used by customers, but it’s also used by many AWS services. Lambda is a serverless execution layer used to run software for customers.
Perhaps in your initial calculations, Lambda would be more profitable, and would take the same amount of work. Obvious that you should build Lambda right? Except that S3 is the backbone of many services. Future services you’d build would rely on the existence of S3, which means that even if it’s less profitable, you should build S3 first.
Your 3-year planning document in this case would detail the list of services you’re currently thinking about, and what infrastructure you’d need to build to make that happen. It’s a way of looking around corners, without being overly detailed. It’s how you’d explain the logic behind your short-term choices.
My 3-year planning experience.
So we began the 3-year planning process with a simple exercise to get everyone involved. We asked every employee to submit all their big 3-year ideas through a form we created, and we (a group of senior leaders) would go through them looking for gems to include in our document.
The idea was to get a bulk list of ideas we could start filtering through, and narrow those down to the perhaps 6-8 big ideas we would include in our long-term vision.
The ideas rolled in. After a few reminders and a couple of weeks, we were at something like 370 ideas. Everyone was so excited! 370 big ideas? Whoo!
We pulled those ideas together, printed them all off for those who like paper, and went to a conference room to read and discuss.
We sat there in true Amazon style for over an hour, reading 370 ideas. The authors usually wrote a few paragraphs for each idea. We quietly made notes to ourselves for our upcoming discussion.
When everyone collectively agreed they had finished reading, I took a pulse of the room. This was roughly 6 senior leaders taken from across the organization to participate in filtering and cataloging all these great ideas.
“How does everyone feel?” I asked the room hesitantly. I had my opinion.
“Wow.” said Whitney. She was a senior leader who was rarely afraid to speak her mind.
“Wow good, or wow bad?” I asked.
“Wow, I literally think every idea is crap.” Whitney said.
Nods around the room. I had personally not flagged a single idea worth following up on. A few senior leaders had been generous and pointed to 2 or 3 ideas which were the least bad. But we agreed that they only hinted at an actual good idea.
The exercise was a disaster. Hundreds of employees were excitedly waiting to see if their idea would make it into the next round. Instead, we were going to have to go back to the drawing board to figure out the future vision of our organization.
I was absolutely shocked. I had expected plenty of bad ideas. But zero good ideas? How is that even possible?
What we later did was request ideas from more senior leaders. Those were higher quality and usable. But why had the junior employees failed? What was it about their ideas which made them not usable?
