Are Right A Lot

How Amazon Raised the Bar on Recruiting Talent | John Vlastelica

Dave Schappell · July 14, 2021 · Leave a Comment

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with John Vlastelica to talk about how Amazon scaled recruitment. They’ll discuss the origin and impact of the Bar Raiser program, where select employees helped pick top notch applicants, the birth of Making Great Hiring Decisions, Amazon’s behavioral interviewing training, how Matt Round’s MRT was designed for the interviewers not recruiters, and the challenges companies face scaling a high hiring bar. John Vlastelica …

How Amazon Created a Personalized Store for Every Customer | Josh Petersen & Matt Round

Dave Schappell · June 16, 2021 · Leave a Comment

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Josh Petersen and Matt Round. The conversation takes us back to Amazon’s early years, when the Personalization team was put together and built on features such as Similarities, Instant Recommendations, Cart Recommendations and more. The team strove to iteratively improve key features; over time, the Personalization and Automation worked toward Jeff Bezos’ vision of “a store for every customer”. They also talk about the effectiveness of …

How Amazon Built the World’s Biggest and Smartest Product Catalog | Rebecca Allen

Rebecca Allen · June 9, 2021 · 2 Comments

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Rebecca Allen. They travel through memory lane by talking about the restructuring of Amazon’s catalog using Base 36, the complications of recycling ISBNs that led to the creation of Amazon’s Standard Identification Number (ASIN), how the Title Authority feature helped customers find books through associations, the seemingly impossible to accomplish Used Books category, and so much more. Rebecca Allen is a former Software Engineer at …

The Story behind ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Numbers)

Rebecca Allen · June 8, 2021 · 18 Comments

During Amazon’s earliest days (1994-1995), CTO Shel Kaphan and Software Engineer Paul (then) Barton-Davis had to write all the software needed to power Amazon.com on the day it offered its website to the world to sell books (official launch date was July 16, 1995). The book catalog was online, and it needed an index (well, it needed several indexes, but that’s another story); specifically, it needed a unique key for each item in the catalog. Because the databases they were using to create the …