Key takeaways

In the latest episode of his Learn and Be Curious podcast, Amazon’s Doug Herrington explains why telling teams to "move faster" doesn't work—and what he does instead.
Herrington says speed can't come at the expense of the customer experience, and that leaders need to be "choiceful" about where they push for pace.
One area where he's pushed teams to accelerate—grocery. And that’s showing up in how customers shop: Nine of the top 10 items sold through Amazon's Same-Day Delivery are now perishables.

In the latest episode of the Learn and Be Curious podcast, Amazon's CEO of Worldwide Stores, Doug Herrington, sat down with Sidira Sisich, a senior product manager on Amazon's grocery team, to talk about everything from her early days at Amazon as a buyer in the home improvement category to the challenge of getting perishable groceries to customers within hours of ordering them.

It was Sisich's question for Doug at the end of the episode that drew out one of his most practical leadership insights: How do you motivate teams to move fast while still insisting on high standards?

"You can't really just run around and tell everybody move faster," Herrington said. "I mean, you could try, but people aren't going to listen to you that much."

Instead, the most effective approach is sitting down with teams and working through the problem together. "Don't just ask them to move faster, but say, OK, let's work together and brainstorm what are ways that we could accelerate progress," he said. "Where could we give up features? What are different solutions that maybe we haven't worked through?"

It's a lesson he traces back to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who used to repeat the phrase "speed matters in business" nearly every week in Amazon's early days, Herrington said.

According to Herrington, Bezos believed that speed could mean the difference between delighting a customer and losing them—or giving a competitor an opening. That urgency eventually became the basis for one of Amazon's Leadership Principles: Bias for Action.

But Herrington was quick to point out that speed alone isn't the goal. Moving fast only works if the customer experience holds up. "You may say, 'I'm going to launch something that's not as fully featured as I want, but it's still going to be excellent and delightful.' And that would be a great reason to push this thing forward," he said. "If you say, 'I can launch it fast, but it's going to be kind of a crappy service'—that's a terrible answer. Because you would actually lose more in the long run."

He pointed to Amazon's Leadership Principles as a built-in check: they're designed so that one principle—like Bias for Action—is always balanced by others, like Insist on the Highest Standards.

Herrington also stressed that leaders can't ask every team to go faster on everything at once. "I remember Jeff used to describe it as saying, ‘we can't have flat priorities,’" Herrington said. "Everything is not equally important."

Herrington focuses on the areas with the biggest customer impact and works closely with those teams to figure out how to accelerate. "If you're going to come and say, 'That's good, but now how do we do it in half the time?' you've got to be choiceful when you're going to go do that," he said.

One area where speed really matters right now: getting perishable groceries onto Amazon.com within the Same-Day Delivery experience.

It's a challenge Sisich and her team have been leading—and the results speak for themselves. Nine of the top 10 items sold through Same-Day Delivery are now perishables like bananas, berries, and limes where the service is available. Avocados recently appeared in the top 10 items sold on Amazon overall.

"This has been my favorite rollout of all of them," Sisich said, recalling the various launches during her nearly 18 years at Amazon. "The pace with which we've been able to work and the impact that we've seen from customers thus far—it's really exciting."

Listen to the full episode of Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington, now available wherever you listen to podcasts.