Invent Like An Owner

Hear from the Folks who built Amazon.com

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How Amazon Raised the Bar on Recruiting Talent | John Vlastelica

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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 …

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How Amazon Prime’s Subscription Management Service was Invented | Neil Roseman & Jorrit Van der Meulen

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Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Neil Roseman & Jorrit Van der Meulen. The discussion revolves around Amazon's DVD rental business which was launched outside of the US, the significance of the Subscription Management Service, and the transition to the Agile/Scrum product development methodology at Amazon. Neil Roseman is the former VP for Software Engineering at Amazon. He is currently the Technologist in Residence at Summit Partners - a funding company …

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

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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 …

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The Story behind ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Numbers)

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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 …

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