What Twelve Years at Amazon Taught Park Jeong-jun

For many shoppers, Amazon begins with the search bar and ends with a parcel. Park Jeong-jun’s book asks what goes on inside the company in between.

Retail is only part of the business. Amazon Web Services supplies cloud computing, and the company has also used its scale to try out new kinds of stores and services.

Twelve years from the inside

Park, a Korean employee working in the United States, spent twelve years at Amazon. The memoir follows what he learned about the company and what it took for him to stay there as long as he did.

That view from inside is the reason to read it. The policies are familiar from business books. Here you get to ask how they change the day of a person doing the work.

A record of Amazon in 2019

The book came out in 2019. It gives us a record of Amazon at a particular stage, when experiments that already looked big were still being tested.

I had picked it up once before. At the time, I did not know much about how companies were run, and surprisingly little of it stayed with me.

I mostly remembered Amazon Go, the checkout-free store experiment. The idea was easy to picture. What it took to make that experience possible did not yet interest me in the same way.

Reading it again in 2022

I came back in 2022. By then I had worked in more companies and begun investing. The same pages gave me different questions about what a business rewards and how employees experience those priorities.

What it means to put the customer first

I knew about Amazon’s reputation for putting the customer first. In Park’s telling, it could determine where a discussion began and which trade-offs were acceptable.

That must be a demanding place to work. I could also imagine feeling proud when you could see what the pressure had made possible for a customer.

Park also writes about equity compensation. Having part of your pay tied to shares can give an employee a stake in what the company becomes over the years.

An address can help recruit people

Park describes a company willing to put offices in a city center to reach the people it wanted to hire. A cheaper building farther out might save money while making the commute or the move harder for candidates.

I could understand that choice. Where people work shapes what the rest of their day looks like. If you want them to join you, the address is part of the offer.

The Jeff Bezos I had not seen

I had mostly seen Jeff Bezos in photographs. I found the pictures stern, so I was curious when the book pointed me toward one of his talks from before he handed over the chief executive role.

His 2003 TED talk surprised me. He was funny, and seemed to enjoy making a dry question about the history of technology interesting.

The dot-com boom was often compared to a gold rush. Bezos reached instead for the history of electricity, asking what people might build after the basic infrastructure had spread. The photographs and jokes kept the analogy light.

An early Kindle advertising experiment

The book also made me think about how a company gets attention. One of Park’s examples came from the Kindle, a product that needed people to understand a new way of reading.

Amazon has spent money on advertising. The Kindle story interested me for the particular way it invited people outside the company to take part.

I looked up an old Kindle spot on YouTube. The homemade quality was part of what made it memorable.

It came out of a contest for user-made commercials. I liked that the company could set the terms and let someone else find a way to show what the device was for.

The pleasure of having work to learn from

By the end I understood why Park put the future in the title. Amazon gave him a place to learn about things he wanted to build and work out how to do them.

There is something satisfying about getting paid to learn the things you would want to understand anyway.

Park also says there were stretches he can hardly believe he got through. He went on to start a business of his own and brought some of what he had learned with him.

The book sent me back to my own years at work. I had never worked anywhere on Amazon’s scale, but there were things to learn in the places I knew. I wanted to give those experiences a more careful second look.

Book details

I Went to Work in the Future at Amazon

Author

Park Jeong-jun

Published

March 7, 2019

ISBN-13

9791157843183

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