What's it like to get a “?” email from Jeff Bezos? [video]

[BrandonWatson]

Hey HN: I've pulled together a video for one of the most common questions I get about Amazon: What's it like to receive a question mark email from Jeff Bezos?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1RD-UDE0rQ

I'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'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://www.interviewat.com/pl/195251 (it's also in the video description text).

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.

[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. :)

[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.

[jasonv]

I think in this case, the "From:" is the "it's important" part and the "?" is the "What's up with this?" part.

I've been a CEO and CTO, but usually in <100 employee companies, so as busy as I might've been, I could ask, "What's up with this?"

I think among all his possible sins, at Amazon scale, "?" itself wouldn't rank super high.

[sheeshkebab]

It’s a passive aggressive and unprofessional - you don’t want your employees talking to each other this way, so don’t start it either.

[stepstop]

Is it though? He only has one side of the story so the (?) is asking for the other side of the story (which they might not be aware of). How do you do it as a CEO?

[wondringaloud]

You spell out your question like a human being, to treat the other human being with respect.

[TravHatesMe]

I agree with you 100%

The larger issue is that Jeff's subordinates will then treat their subordinates in the same way. If this becomes common, it will extend to other behavior or communication. This will result in horrible company culture, where bosses treat their underlings like shit. Do not normalize this type of behavior! That is not good for employee retention, nor employee productivity/morale. It all comes from up top.

[jasonv]

I remember having an ongoing debate with someone who reported to me about the etiquette of emails.

He held that every subsequent email in a long thread should start with, "Hello [name]," before the first paragraph. I thought that was reasonable for the first email, but when things got to the 3rd or 4th response, it was normal to just write your response, first paragraph starting on the first line.

Most of the company did that. He and I had issues. We never resolved this (I gave in on this, as I was trying to resolve our lack of alignment on many fronts), but I find it completely normal in most of the companies I've worked in since.

Especially since those of us who are emailing each other all day long are doing it over and over again, day after day, and getting the friendly formalities when we see other in real space, or on calls.

There's a passive aggressiveness to holding out for higher formalities when the cultural context is otherwise totally fine with shorthands that come with working and communicating with some people a lot.

[nicoburns]

I'd actually prefer to recieve '?' because it allows me to respond with what I consider relevant. As someone unfamiliar with the details of the topic, he's unlikely to know what's relevant, so specific questions are likely to be more of a distraction than anything.

[yomly]

Having actually worked on a handful of "sev-b" tickets I really don't think the "?" is a big deal.

Jeff's email is public and the original correspondence is copied in unchanged.

I'm not even convinced Jeff sent it as I don't think Jeff reads his public email. At a company of size > 100-1000 I don't think the CEO really has the bandwidth to stop and offer insight into the nature of the problem - does "please look into this" or "forwarding" or "cc xyz" or "?" really add much value?

In hindsight they were mildly fun - the forward chain would create a chain of accountability, starting with Jeff to Diego all the way down to an L4 in their 20s to fix a customer problem - each with their neck on the line but without much influence to solve the actual issue at hand.

It really was less an email and an alternative ticketing interface.

[onion2k]

Is it though? He only has one side of the story so the (?) is asking for the other side of the story (which they might not be aware of). How do you do it as a CEO?

A single "?" could mean anything from "This looks interesting, could you give me some additional data." to "What the actual *&($ is this? Explain or your entire team is gone." A little more context would be helpful.

[devalgo]

With words, like a normal human being instead of a one sided power play?

[quicklime]

Yes, it is. I’m sure Jeff understands exactly how these emails make people feel.

If he’s just innocently asking for the other side of the story, he should put together a complete sentence that demonstrates that, rather than sending a single ambiguous character that he knows could be interpreted as “you fucked up, fix this right now or you’re fired!”

[sailingparrot]

> How do you do it as a CEO?

The same way as non-CEOs? Write a 4 words sentence asking for more details?

[tyingq]

It's a tech company. Maybe they could manage a short URL that explains the long list of rules associated with a "Jeff ?" email. And paste that URL instead of a '?'.

[happytoexplain]

Surely one can comment on an example of communication even if the person it came from should be morally judged only on their great sins? It's inherently valuable to talk about examples of communication, especially from a leadership angle - and so conversely this conversation is not exclusively a judgement of a famous person.

[freetanga]

A few years back I realized “Del” was the most valuable key while using my email client. Corporate is full of people looking to create friction as a mean to justify their existence. As we say in my home country, “if you want something you talk to the Circus owner, not to the clowns...”

Would not apply in this case however...

[sqrt17]

A "?" email is a result of exactly that - one of the clowns made an unfunny joke and the customer went to the circus owner.

[mdgrech23]

Would not recommend doing that if the email is coming from the CEO.

[tenebrisalietum]

OP might be the CEO.

[raverbashing]

Yeah it will probably get you a corresponding passive-aggressive pink-slip in a short time

[BrandonWatson]

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

[devit]

Does he have a reminder setup or human assistant to check for answers to the "?" mails?

Someone who can't be bothered to type more than "?" might not bother to check for an answer either.

[benatkin]

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

[syntheticnature]

So, no Netflix, and who's M?

[albntomat0]

I'd guess Microsoft?

[corndoge]

MongoDB

[benatkin]

Meteor

[dekhn]

microsoft? it seems like a better grouping.

[bickeringyokel]

Makes more sense than Netflix

[doctor_eval]

...Microsoft?

[jariel]

'?' is not passive aggressive, it's just not very informative.

CEO's are busy, if the mail is short, that's ok.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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".

[colinplamondon]

Engineer pushback on this was MASSIVE in 2010-2012. There was still a Wild West ethos, so it cost a lot of goodwill to ship the feature. We did it anyways - it was the obvious right thing for the business. Getting there was one of the most heated feature debates I've encountered.

[cameronfraser]

My first thought was that B&N was paying for them as well, the B&N app is/was pretty bad.

[cosmodisk]

At work we occasionally have these moments where a competitor does something and there's no good explanation on why would they do it. Every single time it comes out as some shady practice. Sometimes you just know your competition.

[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".

[mixedCase]

Yes, you're right.

But are you suggesting we should not discuss anything but the biggest problems?

[c3534l]

This investigation netted Amazon a fortune. The world has plenty of problems, but you're only in charge of the ones at your job.

[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"

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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?

[robofanatic]

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

[nvr219]

!

[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

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

[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.

[phone[phone]]

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

[martopix]

?

[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.

[Traster]

Why? It's interesting, you should upvote it.

I mean, obviously what he's telling us is that they've got a stupid broken culture and their intuition about their product is hilariously wrong, but it's still an interesting insight.