Common Amazon Acronyms

Podcast listeners have asked about the definitions of acronyms commonly used at Amazon.com (which have been mentioned during episodes), so here’s a list of common acronyms. I’ll add to this list after future episodes (vs trying to create an all-encompassing list). If I’m missing an acronym that we’ve discussed (or something really commonplace that escaped my mind), contact me.

• 1-Click Shopping – Amazon’s 1-Click shopping button, introduced in 1997 (and patented in 1999), allowed customers to buy things with just one click, without having to re-enter their billing, payment or shipping information.
• A9 – was a division of Amazon that developed innovative search technologies.
• Above the Fold – refers to the visible screen that a person sees without having to scroll. This site real estate is obviously more valuable, as compared to areas that are ‘Below the Fold’.
• Agile / Scrum – a software development methodology (Wikipedia: Agile Software Development) that involves discovering requirements and developing solutions through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customers. It advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continual improvement, and it encourages flexible responses to change (this is a significant change from ‘waterfall’, which tries to anticipate every eventuality and aims to target a single ‘all-included’ launch date that is often long in the future.
• AMZN – this is the NASDAQ stock symbol for Amazon.com – Earth’s Biggest Selection 🙂
• API – Application Programming Interface – this is programming code that enables data transmission between one software product and another. We often refer to APIs when talking about AWS.
• ASIN – Amazon Standard Identification Number. Every Amazon product has a unique alphanumeric identifier that’s used specifically inside Amazon. ASINs can be further broken down into Parent and Child ASINs for products that have one overall item or style (the parent) with multiple choices (child ASINs) when it comes to attributes such as color, size, etc.
• Associates – Amazon’s Affiliate Marketing Program – websites (like this one!) can link to Amazon and earn commissions when the customers they refer purchase items on Amazon. Associates is discussed in detail in Episode 7 (Shawn Haynes)
• AWS – Amazon Web Services – the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud computing platform, offering 100s of fully featured services from data centers around the world.
• Bar Raiser – A Bar Raiser is an interviewer at Amazon who is brought into the hiring process to be an objective third party. By bringing in somebody who’s not associated with the team, the best long-term hiring decisions are made, to ensure that the company is always serving, surprising, and innovating for customers. The role of the Bar Raiser is to be a steward of Amazon’s 16 Leadership Principles and was discussed in detail in Episode 14 (John Vlastelica).
• Blue Badge – Full-time Amazon employees (name came because original badges were all ‘blue’. Originally, there were also yellow (for temporary employees) badges, and there are likely many more colors now.
• Bowtega – this was an early effort to surface (atop search results) the exact item a person was searching for. These Bowtega items were identified by querying the search logs and matching actual ‘purchased items’ to the ‘search terms’ that were used by previous customers.
• Brutal Triage – a pre-launch process, usually led by the Program Manager, which separate launch blockers (i.e. things that you would delay launch for) from nice-to-have features that can launch in the days or weeks following launch.
• Buy Box – this is traditionally where the ‘Add to Cart’ button is found, and is usually on the top right of every Detail Page, Above the Fold.
• CatSubst – the company developed this simple in-house templating system (Cat like the Unix program, Subst like substitution) to make it easier to make webpages without writing lots of string manipulation code in C++. Read more about CatSubst from Charlie Cheever.
• Checksum – a digit representing the sum of the correct digits in a piece of stored or transmitted digital data, against which later comparisons can be made to detect errors in the data. ISBNs have checksums.
• Cookie – a small amount of data generated by a website and saved by your web browser. Its purpose is to remember information about an individual browser, similar to a personal preference file created by a software application.
• CS – Amazon Customer Service
• Customer Self Service – this is a reference to tools provided that allow customers to get answers to their own questions, without having to reach out to Amazon CS. For instance, customers can do things like (a) find out the status of their order or (b) cancel their order.
• Detail Page – every product at Amazon has a Detail Page, with a corresponding ASIN, where you can learn about the product, buy it, read/leave reviews, etc.
• FBA – Fulfillment by Amazon – this is a service provided to 3rd party Sellers on Amazon’s platform where, for a fee, Amazon warehouses and fulfills orders on behalf of sellers.
• FC – Fulfillment Center (these are Amazon Warehouses, and were also called Distribution Centers)
• Fitness Function – used as part of Two Pizza Team management, this translates the business value/impact of a team into a single number. The goal was to make a team’s improvements readily measurable and broadly communicated. They are not used as widely any more. Source (also, Jason Crawford blog post on two pizza teams and fitness functions)
• ISBN – International Standard Book Number – this is a 13-digit ID number assigned to individual books (these are not unique to Amazon). Up til 2006, ISBNs were 10 digits. ISBNs, SKUs, and ASINs may all be used in Detail Pages on Amazon.
• Item Authority – Amazon presents customer with a single item accompanied by an easy-to-compare list of offers to sell that item (used, new, etc). This allows multiple sellers, including Amazon, to make offers to sell the item.
• Just Do It Award – recognizes employees who exemplify two of Amazon’s Leadership Principles: Innovation and Bias for Action, by creating an impact on their own outside of their day job. To qualify for the award: (1) the effort had to be undertaken on the employee’s own initiative, (2) the person can’t have asked permission (which would have slowed down the process), (3) the idea must have been well thought out and (4) the outcome doesn’t necessarily have to have been successful. The recipient gets an old Nike sneaker (sometimes bronzed) to recognize their achievement.
• King of the Hill – this was a technique used by the Personalization team to continuously evaluate different on-site placements to determine which performed best for customers. This was different than a Web Lab, in that it didn’t randomly assign customers to different treatments.
• Landing Page – this is the first page you land on when you visit a website (often from a Google Search). Many companies optimize ‘landing pages’ to increase the conversion rates of Buyers vs. Purchasers.
• Leadership Principles – Amazon tries to live these 16 behaviors every day, from interviewing candidates, to discussing ideas for new projects, or deciding on the best approach to solving a problem. Learn more about Amazon Leadership Principles in John Rossman’s book The Amazon Way or Colin Bryar/Bill Carr’s book Working Backwards.

• Long-Tail – these are the opposite of best sellers. For every ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘Game of Thrones’ there are 1,000s of long-tail products such as Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment 🙂 Long-tail searches usually involve 3 or more search terms (i.e. ‘Paint’ vs ‘Pantone 418C Custom Spray Paint‘)
• MAP – Minimum Advertised Price – this is a price, set by the Merchant, that retailers are not allowed to undercut. Violations of MAP could lead a merchant to discontinue working with a retailer like Amazon.
• Marketplace – original name for the 3rd party selling platform which enabled individuals and businesses to sell used products from the same pages where Amazon sold new products. Over time, this became the entire Amazon Selling Platform. Marketplace can also refer to the location/country of an Amazon store (Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, etc)
• Mechanical Turk – MTurk is one of the many Amazon Web Services. It is a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually
• Merchants@ program – this team built on the early Marketplace software services to enable more brand-focused sellers such as Nordstrom, in categories such as apparel, sporting goods, and more. In its early days, Amazon would be the seller of record, but fulfillment was handled by the merchants themselves. Over time, this changed with the introduction of FBA. Merchants@ was discussed in depth during the podcast interview with John Rossman.
• Merchant.com program – this was a business outsourcing arrangement whereby Amazon ran the entire website on behalf of then partners such as Target.com, ToysRUs.com and others.
• MRT (Matt’s Recruiting Tool) – invented by Matt Round, this internal Amazon recruiting tool helped track interview candidates, resumes, votes (e.g. hire or no hire), and other pieces of information to better manage the interview process. Prior to MRT, this information was poorly transferred via email and/or Peoplesoft (both of which were not very good at their job).
• MSRP – Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price
• OP-1 and OP-2 – Amazon’s semi-annual budgeting and planning process, dubbed OP-1 and OP-2 (OP stands for Operating Plan). The OP-1/2 processes allow the organization to strategically divide resources while still maintaining autonomy and flexibility across divisions/teams.
• OPS – Order Product Sales
• OPW / Other People’s Work – since even Amazon can’t automate a majority of business activity, one of the best ways to scale these unavoidable efforts is to enable and motivate others to do that work on your behalf. Read more about OPW in John Rossman’s post.
• Post Mortem – a process used to identify the causes of a project failure (or significant business-impairing downtime), and how to prevent them in the future. Project post-mortems are intended to inform process improvements which mitigate future risks and to promote iterative best practices.
• Prime / Amazon Prime – is A paid subscription service for free, fast delivery on millions of items. Also includes a range of services and streaming entertainment options such as Prime Video, Prime Music, and more.
• QA (Quality Assurance) Testing – a procedure to ensure the quality of software products or services provided to the customers by an organization. Quality Assurance focuses on improving the software development process and making it efficient and effective as per the quality standards defined for software products. Quality Assurance is popularly known as QA Testing.
• Q1 – 1st Quarter of the Year (Jan – Mar). Often referred to when discussing financial results (i.e. Q1 Earnings)
• Q2 – 2nd Quarter of the Year (Apr – Jun)
• Q3 – 3rd Quarter of the Year (Jul – Sep)
• Q4 – 4th Quarter of the Year (Oct – Dec). This is Amazon’s busiest quarter of the year, due to holiday shopping.
• Sales Rank – Amazon’s internal ranking of products in search and browse. Sales rank is more driven by actual purchases by customers whereas earlier sales ranks (such as the New York Times bestseller list) were driven by ‘orders’ (so could be gamed by retailers placing large orders, even if customers ended up not buying the product).
• SDE – Software Development Engineer
• SDP / Single Detail Page – code name for launch of Amazon Marketplace
• SEO / Search Engine Optimization – Efforts to increase traffic and visibility in search results (Google, Bing, etc) on the web. Refers only to Organic (unpaid, free) results, as opposed to paid placement, such as Google Ads.
• SKU / Stock Keeping Unit – composed of an alphanumeric combination of eight+ characters (it’s often also presented as a scannable bar code that you see on product package).
• SLA / Service Level Agreement – defines the level of service expected by a customer from a supplier, laying out the metrics by which that service is measured, and the remedies or penalties, should the SLA not be achieved. SLAs may be established not only between companies and external suppliers, but increasingly they are also set between departments (or APIs) within a company.
• S-Team – the Senior Management Team at Amazon; all members report in to the CEO (originally Jeff Bezos; to be replaced by Andy Jassy in Q3 2021)
• Third Party (3P) Seller – A 3P merchant is a business that sells products that aren’t their own brand or product. Sellers, using Seller Central, sell product directly to consumers on Amazon under their own business name, taking on the role of retailers. Learn about the difference between Amazon vendors and Amazon sellers.
• Title Authority – catalog process (modeled on work described by the Library of Congress) that is needed to identify relationships between products. The work makes it easier for shoppers to identify relationships between products. It is required for many reasons, including these examples:
  • names and titles vary (Jim Smith and James K. Smith may be the same person
  • you may have different titles even within the same publication)
  • names change over time (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; people take on stage names… Woody Allen (stage name) vs. Allen Stewart Konigsberg (real name)
  • titles change over time (serials change titles over many years; editions are revised and include different names)
• Two Pizza Team – Amazon strives to have fully-contained teams that own services or features, with the team being small enough so that it could feed everyone with two pizzas. This target size helps to minimize management overhead, and thus increase the pace of iteration. Teams were meant to have ‘Fitness Functions’ which would be a regularly-updated metric that determines if they are improving the key metrics for their service/feature.
• UI / User Interface (Design) – this is what you see on a website or app
• UPC / Universal Product Code – code printed on retail product packaging to aid in identifying a particular item. It’s usually a 12-digit number displayed with the barcode on the vast majority of products.
• Urubamba – code name for the launch of Amazon’s Automated Advertising (on Google) project, discussed in Episode 5 (Blake Scholl)
• UX – User Experience (Design)
• V3 – was a site redesign launched in Q4 1997 (goal was to get it out before the holidays). Included new “Instant Recommendations”, Site Navigation and other UI features (such as Browse, and lists of featured titles) in order to help potential customers navigate through Amazon’s growing catalog. Interview Guest Alex Edelman shares details about Amazon’s V3 launch and even provided a Design Review mockup from 1997 from that project.
• Web Dev / Web developer – in earlier Amazon speak, a Web Dev did more front-end HTML work. Nowadays, differentiating SDEs and Web Devs is more nuanced
• Web Lab (aka A/B Test) – simultaneously testing two (or more) different versions of a webpage, or product experience. Amazon’s weblabs then randomly assign customers to each of the different versions and track their progress, to see which version worked to better achieve the desired goal (e.g. product sales; subscripitons). Episode 13 with Eric Benson discussed the creation of Web Lab experiments.
• Working Backward – Amazon’s product development methodology, which starts (before any code is written) with drafting the launch-day press release, and a number of other documents (FAQ, 6-pagers, and more). The idea is to make sure that what you’re building will make a meaningful impact with customers and be differentiated from competitors in meaningful ways.