How Amazon Used Imagination and Technology to Invent for Customers | Maryam Mohit

Invent like an Owner with Dave Schappell

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Maryam Mohit. They talk about the different iterations of the early Amazon website that massively improved customer experience. Key improvements included navigation, browse, adding search to the homepage, personalizing the website, adding electronic gift certificates, expanding to new categories and much more. It was all made possible by listening to customers and translating their confusion and input into innovative product solutions.

Maryam Mohit, former VP for Site Development, was one of Amazon’s earliest employees, and was hired to “make the Amazon website interactive”. She went from working with a small initial team (one HTML developer and hiring the first QA) to running what became a department of more than 200 front-end engineers, web developers, designers, editors and researchers responsible for the features and functionality of the website, and the overall online customer experience.

Episode Resources:

• Maryam Mohit’s LinkedIn
• Nextdoor
• One Sky Giving Circle
• BrightWorks
• Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 02:23 Joining Amazon in 1996
• 07:15 Talked to customers to understand the problems they were having with the Amazon website
• 11:18 Search page wasn’t yet a part of the Amazon homepage
• 11:51 The Amazon Checkout pipeline was a 12-page process
• 13:35 Barnes and Noble was the biggest competition
• 14:22 What Amazon’s V2 homepage looked liked
• 15:58 Goals set during the site redesign
• 19:13 The 1-Click ordering feature and how it came to be
• 27:14 After every major project, teams did post-mortem sessions
• 30:53 Executing customer feedback and incorporating it into the Amazon website
• 32:14 Amazon’s V4 launch was a holiday release
• 36:56 HTML 1.0 was basically writing every page by hand
• 39:29 With V5, Amazon launched other products aside from books (music/CDs)
• 45:50 Signed their Meeting maker launch schedule in blood
• 47:39 Tabbed navigation introduced for the first time
• 50:52 V6 focused on Amazon Video/DVD store and the holiday gift center
• 55:00 Feel the urgency of the pain that customers are saying in their own voice