Think Like Amazon
Learn how to apply Amazon’s core principles and innovation frameworks to elevate your business and career. Join Jorge Luis Pando, an 8-year Amazon veteran who’s helped over 70,000 Amazonians boost productivity, as he dives into real-world insights from leaders who’ve transformed their work using Amazon-inspired methods like customer obsession and systems thinking. With global experience in product, tech, and marketing, Jorge brings a fresh perspective to every conversation.
Whether you lead a startup, growing business, or team outside of tech, each episode delivers practical tools to innovate, scale, and lead with confidence. Follow us on LinkedIn for updates: https://www.linkedin.com/company/think-like-amazon-podcast/
Think Like Amazon
Deliver Results by identifying the right inputs with Eugene Choi
Eugene Choi spent 7 years at Amazon as Finance Director for Retail Softlines and AWS Infrastructure prior to joining the executive teams of Oberto Snacks and Viacom CBS. In this episode, Eugene breaks down how he learned Amazon's input-focused process to uncover business opportunities and deliver results. Eugene shares how leaders can help both free up their teams and better serve customers by having the discipline to not follow competitors but instead focus on the key input drivers of a product or service. Eugene takes us through examples of how he worked backwards to identify the right inputs and later applied this same approach at Oberto Snacks and ViacomCBS and shares how others can adopt this same approach.
More from the episode:
5:45 - Deliver results by focusing on the inputs, not outputs
7:00 - How Amazon senior leaders review weekly performance
8:27 - How AWS focuses on spare-parts expenses as an input to prevent negative customer experiences
10:40 - Why an output focus inadvertently limits customer choice
16:03 - Adopting input-focused diagnosis to challenges outside Amazon
20:40 - The need for discipline and investigation to adopt an input-focused approach
24:07 - How managing by inputs fits into Amazon's "working backwards" approach