How Amazon Used Imagination and Technology to Invent for Customers | Maryam Mohit

Invent like an Owner with Dave Schappell

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3y ago 59:51

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Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Maryam Mohit. They talk about the different iterations of the early Amazon website that massively improved customer experience. Key improvements included navigation, browse, adding search to the homepage, personalizing the website, adding electronic gift certificates, expanding to new categories and much more. It was all made possible by listening to customers and translating their confusion and input into innovative product solutions.

Maryam Mohit, former VP for Site Development, was one of Amazon’s earliest employees, and was hired to “make the Amazon website interactive”. She went from working with a small initial team (one HTML developer and hiring the first QA) to running what became a department of more than 200 front-end engineers, web developers, designers, editors and researchers responsible for the features and functionality of the website, and the overall online customer experience.

Episode Resources:

What to Listen For:

00:00 Intro
02:23 Joining Amazon in 1996
07:15 Talked to customers to understand the problems they were having with the Amazon website
11:18 Search page wasn’t yet a part of the Amazon homepage
11:51 The Amazon Checkout pipeline was a 12-page process
13:35 Barnes and Noble was the biggest competition
14:22 What Amazon’s V2 homepage looked liked
15:58 Goals set during the site redesign
19:13 The 1-Click ordering feature and how it came to be
27:14 After every major project, teams did post-mortem sessions
30:53 Executing customer feedback and incorporating it into the Amazon website
32:14 Amazon’s V4 launch was a holiday release
36:56 HTML 1.0 was basically writing every page by hand
39:29 With V5, Amazon launched other products aside from books (music/CDs)
45:50 Signed their Meeting maker launch schedule in blood
47:39 Tabbed navigation introduced for the first time
50:52 V6 focused on Amazon Video/DVD store and the holiday gift center
55:00 Feel the urgency of the pain that customers are saying in their own voice

15 episodes

#Careers #Entrepreneur #Business #Dave Schappell #Amazon #History #Innovation #Inventions