Amazon VP On Promotions, Getting Fired Twice, Working With Bezos | Ethan Evans

26:16Yeah. So I had a star young engineer who made this deal with me and I made the deal in good faith. He said, oh, I will help ship our very first version of our product. I'll do whatever it takes. You get me from what we called SDE one, which was the new college hire level to SDE two. And I'm like, great, got it. I'll do that. I had always worked at startups where when you wanted to promote someone, you just kind of went to your boss and maybe HR and said, we should promote this guy. And you did it. Amazon had a process and they only did promotions twice a year. And they had a cycle. Our project launch was a mess, not his fault, but we had problems.

26:51I was busy looking at the problems in trying to, you know, fix the product, the cycle came and went. He's like, hey, where's my promotion? I went and asked, oh, how do we do this? And they're like, yeah, you can do that in the spring, maybe. The factor was my, and I've written about this very publicly, I own it. It was my ignorance. And so the problem is we made a deal in good faith that I didn't know how to keep. So that's my error. The advice for someone making the deal is figure out, is your manager a veteran? Do they know what they're doing? You know, do they understand the process or do you?

27:26And this is a common problem because people get new managers very often. So even if I hadn't been the idiot in this situation, it could have been somebody else who was hired in. Can, do you understand the process? I think part of the issue is that engineer, which is not his fault, but he also didn't know. And so it was an ugly discovery for him. Like, oh, we missed the date and sorry. He didn't know to tell me like, hey, Ethan, you got to be doing this. You know, there's a date and you got. Now, is that his responsibility? It's not. It was mine. But the tricky part is it's your life. And so if you're the engineer in that situation, probably people all know the story from Scrum and chickens and pigs, right?

28:07The pig is committed. The chicken's only involved in the ham and eggs restaurant. The manager is the chicken in this. Their life isn't on the line. It's you. You're the one who's going to get hurt. So know the process and make sure the manager is like, OK, I'm going to do this. And you're like, OK, well, by September 15th, are you going to have a document done? And if they say, why does September 15th matter? That's like a warning sign, right? Why does that matter? That's the deadline. Oh, there's a deadline like that. You know, that conversation would have been very revealing if he'd have known to have it.

28:39And I feel terrible about it. It's why I've written about it publicly is I don't want it to happen to anybody else. So this guy left. He joined another big tech company. he's had an amazing career there it cost him a year and i i feel bad about that but the truth is careers are 20 30 years long or more things in life are going to cost you a year sometimes that's not fatal so when you hit that i just wasted a year you can either mope about it and be depressed or you can move on he moved on and was successful i've moved on and been successful you can make that change. So after you got promoted to VP, I saw that you switched business verticals.

29:18You went to the Twitch partnerships or managing the Twitch partnership and then later into gaming. I'm curious, it sounds like the Twitch acquisition was right before you became kind of in that role. Were you the VP in charge of plugging them in or what's the story behind that role? Amazon's a big company. So it had a process that every time it bought a company and we spent$970 million on Twitch, so a billion dollars. They take a VP and they make them kind of what you'd call the integration liaison, the person who's going to facilitate making sure you get your billion dollars worth. The trick is they leave the CEO in charge.

29:56So Emmett Shear, we talked about, you're aware of Emmett. Emmett was still in charge of Twitch. I was not his boss. Instead, I purposefully sought out that role. We talked about working on soft skills. I had become vice president running Amazon's App Store, and I had a team of 800. And so I was now very good at running a global team of hundreds of people. But that's where I had authority. I decided to challenge myself and go take a role where I had a goal, help Twitch integrate, but I had no authority. I was simply an advisor to the CEO. I had no team and I had to achieve this goal without being able to give this guy any orders.

30:35And here's a guy who's just been made wealthy for life. He's 15 or 16 years younger than me. He's in a business that serves mostly teenagers and people in their 20s. You know, he's 33 or so. I'm late 40s at that point. How am I going to influence him in how to run his sort of millennial Gen Z business when I'm neither? And I wanted that challenge to work on my soft skills. So I gave up the team of 800 to go figure out how to do this. It's a fascinating story that worked out really well. And I really enjoyed working with Emmett, as well as, of course, learning to live stream on Twitch and all kinds of stuff.

31:16When I see these founders with rocket ship trajectories, I don't know the exact size of Twitch at the time, but maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of employees. at such a young age. I'm curious when you work with a young founder like that as a seasoned manager with tons of experience, what are the gaps that you notice in someone that has such a unique management trajectory? Or are there none? Oh, no, there were plenty of gaps. I think Emmett would agree with that if he were here with us. We might not agree on what the gaps were. So first, to give you scope, Twitch was several hundred employees at that point and grew within the next couple of years to be a thousand.

31:57So he was on a very rocket trajectory. The biggest problem was Twitch was a classic venture funded company. It was bleeding cash, you know, at a huge rate. And in fact, one of the gaps was in the beginning Emmett and certainly members of his team didn't even think this was a problem. Well, they had always been able to get venture money. And now the way they originally looked at it, I remember people in Twitch on the management team looking at me and saying, well, now that Amazon's bought us, you guys have lots of money. Why do we need to worry about profitability or advertising? Why can't we just focus on the gaming?

32:36And my job was to help move them to profitability. So I'm like, whoa, Houston, we have a problem. They don't even see it as a worthy goal. Meanwhile, the management chain above me, because I ultimately reported into Andy Jassy, who's now CEO of Amazon, he wanted profitability quite soon. So you're trapped between a group of people who are like, ah, why does this even matter anymore? You guys have all the money in the world. So that was one gap. Another gap that I would say Emmett learned the hard way over time. It's very easy to be loyal to your early employees, but not all of them can scale. And so Emmett went through a big learning cycle of, I'm going to have to hire in somebody over this person who was with me from the beginning.

33:21And I'm going to have to explain to this person who's a friend of mine, love you. You're going to make a lot of money because your stock options are now Amazon shares, but you're not going to remain whatever, chief product officer or fill in the blank. And that was a big discovery, I think, for Emmett that he had to replace some friends or level them. And a few of them quit and were angry. You mentioned that you reported to Andy Jassy, the now CEO of Amazon, and I imagine you had some proximity to Jeff Bezos or had been in meetings with them. Comparing and contrasting the leadership styles between the two, is there something that stands out from each or maybe a story that you think illustrates those things?

34:07Yeah, so I knew Jeff pretty well. Yeah, I'm not gonna claim he's like a best buddy of mine, but I probably had about 50 meetings with him and about 50 with Andy in different contexts. So I know them both, you know, spending dozens of hours with them and working for them. The biggest difference is Jeff's the founder. And what that means is he can take gambles with the company that others won't. So a story I remember is in a budget discussion, our chief financial officer was trying to slow down Jeff's spending on something. And he said to Jeff, well, you know, Jeff, we only have so much money in the bank.

34:44Trying to like just pump the brakes a little because Jeff was, let's do this and let's do this and the price tag's going up. And the CFO said, you know, Jeff, we only have so much money in the bank. And Jeff looked at him and this was the previous CFO to the current one. And he said, well, Tom, how much is that? Because I might want to spend it. And he was just telling his CFO like, thank you. your job is to count the pennies and my job is to allocate them and don't don't confuse your role in my role and andy is a more classic i don't recall if he has an nba i think he does but he's a more classic business leader he's not going to tell his cfo you know stick a sock in it that he's going to see that he has to partner and that's because it's not his toy right he is the paid leader, but it's not his company.

35:33And that no matter how much I respect Andy, that's just very hard to get over because when it's your toy, Jeff definitely felt that he could, you know, sort of take metaphorically take the whole company to Vegas and bet it on black, right? That like, he had that right. I built it. I can do what I want with it. Whereas for Andy, he helped build it, but he has to actually do what the board wants with it and what Jeff wants with it. And that's just different. Both Jeff and Andy put great demands on me and other leaders. For me personally, for my style, I felt Jeff was emotionally behind me and supportive.

36:10And I felt Andy was kind of always waiting to see if I'd screw up. And so if we brought in 10 executives who worked for both of them, not all of them have had that experience. I found working for Jeff much more inspiring and And not just because he was the founder, but because he seemed enthusiastic. Andy seemed more ready to ask more probing questions. And I, at least as a personality, need that leader who, yes, they ask all the questions, but then they're like, OK, I'm on board. Let's do it. We'll do it together. And I never got a like, we'll do it together from Andy. I always feel like I got, OK, it's your plan.

36:47You're on the hook now. Let me know when it's done. It didn't inspire me the same way. You mentioned being scrutinized. And I saw that you had written about how you started the prime gaming vertical with some peers. And you mentioned that it had failed multiple times. I'm kind of curious, what does a VP's performance review look like if the business vertical they started is failing? So this is a flaw of big companies. Because often when I say something was failing, we would hit most of our goals. Ship this, build that, add this feature. We might even hit some financial goals, but we weren't achieving the vision.

37:26The vision of Prime Gaming, the original vision Jeff wanted, was to make Amazon a real player in the video game business. At one point, his vision was, how can we be as big as Tencent, which is the largest gaming company in the world out of China? So we met a bunch of goals, but we were never on track to become like that. And certainly, Prime Gaming has never done anything like that. Amazon Game Studios, all the gaming pieces, they're very niche. So when I say it failed multiple times, I think it failed against the vision. You can get a good review for ticking all the boxes and hitting all these interim goals and not really be on track for doing anything significant.

38:09Right before I left the Amazon App Store to join Twitch, I told a peer, I said, you know, this year I'm going to hit every goal and it's going to be meaningless. And the proof of that in some ways is now 10 years later, Amazon has shut down its app store. They use it internally, I think, but all external use has been, you know, for phones and whatever. They've given up after 10 more years. Well, I saw that coming 10 years ago. But big companies can get lost in, well, we're hitting the goals. And they confuse hitting the goals for doing something actually valuable. The bottom line is I was rated well as a VP every year of my career.

38:49And yet when I look at did some of the things I do really succeed, I'm very proud that we launched Prime Gaming and we put Amazon in the game business. But it hasn't gone anywhere. And it won't surprise me if in two, three or five years, Amazon shutters that. Now, it also won't surprise me if they get some leader who figures out how to make it big. But there's a lot of sort of zombie products in a big company that no one quite wants to pull the trigger on shutting down because that's a big decision and an admission of failure. But no one really knows how to make big either. So they just kind of bump along.

39:23It sounds like even forward looking, like being in it, you hadn't achieved the goals yet. And you looked at the goals and you said, these are not impactful. Did you ever have a thought of let's make the goals more ambitious or let's change the goals so that they're the ones that align with the vision? Sure. The problem is, you know, you're going to be judged on them. So there's a tension between the goals you think matter and the goals you have any idea how to hit. So I'll tell you for the Amazon App Store, the goal was somehow compete with Google on on Android phones. when Google comes pre-installed and Amazon is a side load, like that people have to decide they want and then opt into.

40:05I had no idea how to compete basically with an endemic store, a pre-installed store on its own phone. That was the goal. Of course, I argued strongly against being judged against that because I didn't know how to do it. I would say other leaders who came after me who were quite hardworking obviously didn't know how either. For my review and my pay, I want goals I know I can nail. And for the good of the company, I actually want goals that I have no idea how to do. And so when I said this, I was like, yeah, I'm going to nail all these goals that I thought to be measured on. And I'm going to miss all these goals that actually matter because I don't know how to do them.

40:43And it turns out maybe they were impossible. The, you know, again, if you think about this aspiration, oh, Amazon wants to be 10 cent in games. Well, this is like if you work at some e-commerce startup saying, well, Ryan, we want you to take a goal to be a second Amazon. You might be like, well, I get why that would be valuable. I do understand that's a great vision, but I'll pass. With your tenure as a manager at Amazon, I kind of wanted to talk about, you know, management practices like, you know, stack ranking, performance-based layoffs, pips, those types of things. So I'm curious, you know, Amazon's pretty famous for stack ranking and, you know, really aggressively managing people out.

41:28Yeah. What are your thoughts on these types of systems? About 10 years ago, Amazon ran an experiment where after getting years of bad press for stack ranking, they removed what was called the unregretted attrition goal. So Amazon has a goal every year for what they call unregretted attrition, which means people, it's a nice way of saying people we want to leave. And we don't care if you pressure them into quitting or they get fired. It's just, there's a number and you put people on a list of folks you want out and you can either improve their performance to where you take them off the list. They can quit or you can fire them, but you have to hit a goal and it's usually like 7 % a year.

42:09Sometimes it's as low as four, sometimes it's as much as seven. So Amazon uses lots of words to kind of cloak this process, but the bottom line is it's fire the bottom 5 % or so. Here's the thing. When we remove the goal, managers immediately stop having hard conversations and talking to their struggling performers because without the pressure of having to do it, It was just easier to focus on your good people and let that problem person hang around because it's not in a big company. It's not costing your burn rate that you know about or care about. And you don't have to have that unpleasant conversation.

42:48And you also don't have to be the bad guy. One of the worst things about being a manager is you may have someone who isn't very good, but is well liked. They're friendly. They are outgoing. They bring donuts. They organize the parties. Everybody likes them. And so now you have to not only have a hard conversation with them, but if you do move them out or if they talk to other people like Ethan's trying to fire me, then everybody's like, why are you trying to fire Ryan? He's awesome. We love him. Well, it may be that, you know, you have lots of performance problems, but other people aren't seeing those.

43:21So when we remove the goal, people stop having the hard conversation. So the next year, Amazon put it back and it's kept it every year since. So on the one hand, many managers avoid actually performance managing if they're not forced at gunpoint. An unfortunate truth. On the other hand, because there's a list and because there's a goal, you would then be in a situation where someone who had a chance to succeed, maybe, you had to put on the list to make your quota, and you ask how well the pips work. I think most pips are a combination of dishonest and or psychologically unrealistic. Because once I've decided that I'm going to put you on this list, or once I've decided you're enough of a problem that I need to write up this plan and have this ugly conversation with you, mentally I've already moved to, we have to get rid of Ethan, right?

44:18We have to get rid of Ryan. They're not good. Recovering, it sort of doesn't matter what you do unless it's amazing. I've already decided. And so my cognitive bias is going to be self-fulfilling. So what I recommend, you know, this has happened. I coach people. I have had half a dozen people reach out to me for coaching and say, I was just put on a pip at Amazon. I really want to succeed. Help me. And I've tried and they've all gotten fired. And so now when people call me, this is funny, they call me and they say, I'm on a pip. And I'm like, so what you need to do is spend that time on the pip looking for your next job because you're going to be fired.

44:53And they're like, no, no, I'm going to overcome it. And I'm like, good luck with that. Tell me what happened. And three months later, I get a note that says, you were right. I was fired. And the reason I state both people I coach and people I don't is, of course, you could suspect, well, maybe I'm a lousy coach and I didn't dig them out of the hole. But the people I didn't coach got fired, too. It's a self-evil. Like, once you're at that stage, it's going to happen. Very few people ever dig out of them. Now, I believe some managers in their minds start a pip with honest, good intention. but at least at Amazon, you have your HR business partner and your boss asking you all the time, how's it going?

45:30When are we going to exit that person? I need them on my quota. You know, if you actually want to take someone off a pip, more than likely your manager is going to be saying, well, who else are you going to put on? Cause we still have to meet the number. So you're, then you're looking around and you're like, well, I put the lowest performing person on my team on. And now I'm being told if I take them off of the hip, I have to put somebody else on. So of course you're like, well, so the conclusion is companies stink at performance management. They don't train managers how to do it. They don't train managers how to have the conversation early.

46:01They don't create a system where you can talk to people and say, you know, this isn't working out. Maybe you want to leave because that opens you up to a lawsuit. We just have a dysfunctional performance system. In your writing, you wrote something that said, a manager can fire anyone they want and HR is not there to protect you. I would have thought there's checks and balances to this, that that is not true. I guess I would hope that it's not true. What is stopping a manager from painting their report in an unfair light? Or is there nothing stopping that? I love that you called this out. I agree with what I wrote.

46:35The nuance is as a manager, I could get rid of any one employee I wanted, but I can't get rid of every employee. And so if I create a pattern where I'm driving one employee after another out, I will eventually get caught and burned for that. Because we do look at what is a manager's turnover rate. My point was, for any single employee, I can absolutely, if I choose to, end that person's career at my company. And at Amazon, it's as simple as put them on this list. It's partly who strikes first. So by the time you go to HR, I've already put you on this list and told my story of why I think you're bad.

47:14And now you're going, no, no, it's unfair. He hates me. Well, the problem is the people, all the people they've heard from who are legitimately bad are saying the same thing. Right there. They're saying, no, I'm actually good. It's my boss hates me and doesn't understand me. So they hear that story every day. So when you legitimately tell it and it's actually true and it's just I hate you, you just you end up sounding like everyone else. And so that's why it's stacked in my favor. Now, I have never done this, but I've looked at the system and just seen. I have people all the time who say, well, my boss told a lie about me.

47:47Well, again, it's your word versus mine. And I'm the one who's got the higher level, maybe the more tenure. If I choose to say, well, you know, Ryan looks really busy, but he's mostly just doing pull requests on other people's code. I can downplay what you're doing. Because see, I can tell this story of Ryan is an amazing engineer. He makes everybody's code better because he does all these insightful reviews and he's up leveling the whole team. That's narrative one. Same facts. He did 700 pull requests this quarter or whatever. Narrative two is, you know, Ryan actually doesn't contribute much.

48:27He thinks he does and he spends all this time doing code reviews, but look at how little he's actually written himself. And really, he's just busy nitpicking people and churning away. And sure, his numbers look good, but those numbers are actually a sign of the problem. Now, I've taken your same performance and spun it two ways. My point that people aren't going to like is a manager can do that. And maybe they're doing that because they're a jerk and they've decided you threaten them and they want to get rid of you. Maybe they just have a different view. You think you're doing really valuable stuff and they don't.

49:00And they're saying what they honestly believe. But the point is performance that you would think is really easy to measure, like look at these numbers, look how many valuable code reviews I did, can be used either way. Nothing about software engineering performance is so objective. objectives. And so bad managers, truly bad or evil managers do get caught eventually. But clever managers who just want to get rid of one person would be able to do that because they're in the driver's seat. And more importantly, they get to make the preemptive strike. They get to tell the story about why that person's a problem before that person ever knows it's happening.

49:35And so it's kind of like, yes, you can slap the mosquito after it bites you, but it doesn't take away being bitten. I mean, it's unfortunate that that's true, but it also illustrates the power of storytelling in a way. The exact same facts can be spun as a bad thing or a good thing. So people are going to hear this and believe like, oh, see, managers are just like personally firing people because they hate them. I am sure that happens. It's not in a manager's best interest. They are judged on accomplishing their goals that, you know, good managers are trying to find partners they can work with that will help everyone achieve.

50:15I just want to be honest that if you do have a difficult boss and you make them angry and they're a vindictive sort of person, beware, they hold like you're bringing a knife to a gunfight. They're the one with the gun and you're probably going to lose. If you have a boss like that, don't get in the knife or gunfight. Either figure out what you can allow you to make friends with them or find a different manager. That's the actual point. Don't think that somehow HR is going to come investigate and rescue you. Definitely. That just isn't what they do. I want to be mindful of your time. And so I have one last question for you, which is that if you could go back to your career right at the beginning when you had just graduated and entered the industry and give yourself some advice, what would that advice be?

51:00So I'll answer in two ways. One of them I did and one of them I really didn't. The thing I would do is always prefer high growth. My whole career was in companies that were growing very rapidly. And I compare that people talk about a career ladder. Well, my ladder was always an escalator. I could climb, but it was also moving up for me. And so the reason I got where I went is because Amazon grew 100 fold while I was there from 10 ,000 people to a million revenue grew like 80 times. The escalator went up and I wrote it. I also climbed. So that part, I would keep the same. The thing I would change is probably not surprising you.

51:36I would wake up much sooner to jobs are still with other humans. It's great to be an expert. It's great to be right, but build the skills to have the relationships, make the friends, get to know lots of people. And you don't have to be an extrovert to do that. I was a classic introvert. I've certainly learned to be more extroverted, but with online tools like LinkedIn or Pick Your Tool, you can make a reputation and build connections from the safety of your keyboard in your darkened room all by yourself. And so do whatever works for you, but get known because it works so much better. You know, Amazon called me for the job, not the other way around.

52:20And you want that happening. So build that reputation. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, Ethan. at the end of the interview, like to give you an opportunity, where can people find you? Or is there something you'd like people to check out? So the easiest place to find me is either Ethan Evans VP on LinkedIn or ethanevans.com, my website. I'm well known for teaching classes about how to get past the promotion hurdle we've talked a lot about. So if my style of straight talk in this interview works for you, then that's what I do all the time. And if that's your flavor of ice cream, then I'm your vendor.

52:58Thanks so much, Ethan. Really appreciate your time. Yeah, my pleasure, Ryan. Thank you for having me. Hey, thanks for watching the show. I don't sell anything or do sponsorships, but if you want to support, you can subscribe on YouTube or you can leave a review on Spotify. And I'm always looking for new guests to interview. So if anyone comes up who you think you really want to hear their career story, let me know and I'll try to reach out to them and get them on the show. Thanks for listening as always. And I'll see you next time.