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What It Was like to Be Amazon’s 5th Software Engineer | Eric Benson

Dave Schappell · July 7, 2021 · Leave a Comment

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Eric Benson to discuss his myriad early software engineering projects at a time when Amazon was rapidly growing as a company. He implemented Book Matcher (which didn’t last long) and the Similarities feature, and later built the original version of Weblabs that helped test which Amazon features were optimal. Eric also mentored many of the new software engineers, and later worked to port Amazon from Digital Unix to Linux (along with Bob …

How Amazon Built its Merchant Selling Platform | John Rossman

Dave Schappell · June 23, 2021 · Leave a Comment

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with John Rossman. They talk about how the Merchants@ program was built from scratch, why working directly with third party sellers prompted the principle of seller obsession, launching the Apparel and Sporting Goods categories, developing smaller teams within the retail organization, and essentially, how Amazon’s Leadership Principles led the way to writing his book, “The Amazon Way”. John Rossman is the former Director of Merchant …

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

Dave Schappell · June 2, 2021 · 3 Comments

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 …

How Amazon Automated its Google Advertising and Drove Billions in Sales | Blake Scholl

Dave Schappell · May 12, 2021 · 1 Comment

Today, on the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Blake Scholl. They discuss Blake's time working on the Amazon Personalization team, and how he went on to build the team that built Amazon's Automated Advertising engine, that dynamically placed ads on Google Ads (before Google even had an API). Amazon's Automated Advertising engine started slow, but went on to drive billions in profitable sales for the company. It was fun to hear not only about the successes, but also about the …