Amazon’s real business strategy is delight as a service

Photo by Luke Dorny

Faces buried in stacks of paper, no one seemed to notice as I walked in and quietly found a seat. It was my first week working at Amazon and we were all meeting to discuss growth, sales, and other key metrics.

Surprisingly, almost all of my Amazon Prime team were there including developers, designers, financial staff, and managers. This is the culture at Amazon: everyone needs to obsess over the metrics.

It was 2009, a time when Amazon Prime, a subscription service that offers unlimited 2-day shipping and discounted next day delivery, was a clear success and growing rapidly. Although perks like Prime Video, Prime Music, and Unlimited photo storage were not yet included within the subscription, our numbers already showed people loved the service.

I assumed our metrics discussion would be focused primarily on growing our subscriber base, so I was surprised when my manager brought up an unusual segment of our users: Customers who had subscribed to Amazon Prime, paid the yearly fee, but hadn’t used the service since they didn’t make a single purchase all year.

Amazon Prime was already experiencing massive growth. Unlike most companies that would look to catapult off this growth and focus solely on acquiring even more new users, the Prime team was obsessed over a small…