ZACK CIESINSKI: Amazing. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining. My name is Zack Ciesinski. I lead Product Partnerships at Stripe, focused on our payment method partners; and super excited to have Natalia here, Chief Marketing Officer for Amazon Pay, to talk to us a bit more about how Amazon builds a culture of innovation. Before we get started, Natalia, welcome. Do you want to give a quick intro to yourself? 

NATALIA FINELLI: H,i Zack. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Great to see you all here. Yeah, a little bit about my background. I have been called at some point in the past a triple jumper. Ten years ago, when I joined Amazon, I actually did three changes in my career simultaneously, which is not really advised. 

I was back in Brazil, where I’m from, and I moved to Europe. And back then I was already working for a few years with a financial services and marketing GTM. So building segmentation models. And then I joined Amazon to work on ecommerce in more like a product program management role. So quite a big change, but very exciting. And I spent my first seven years at Amazon in that space, working with Fulfillment by Amazon, so very deep into the ecommerce logistics space, a growing seller base, helping sellers grow their business. 

But, you know, things have a way of circling back around. So I am back in marketing and back in financial services. Like, you can follow your passion and that’s what happens. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Awesome. Well, you’ve been at Amazon for 10 years. I would love to start somewhat broad. How do you think about the word “innovation”? What does that mean at Amazon? 

NATALIA FINELLI: Yeah, I mean, I think about it very simply. Innovation for me is just to do something a little bit different than what you did before. 

And sometimes we can think about innovation as it only classifies innovation if it’s something big. But actually, we are innovating every day when we are making small changes and small improvements in an iterative way. And that’s what we do the majority of the time, and building on things that came before as well. Right? 

So let’s take gen AI, because everybody’s talking about gen AI. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Of course.

NATALIA FINELLI: Let’s say you take gen AI. It’s the big word of the moment. But if you really dig deeper, Amazon and many other companies out there have been playing in the AI field, and before that in machine learning, for many years. In Amazon, we use it everywhere. We use it for search. We use it to improve customer service responses. We use it to improve our predictive models for forecasting, for inventory. 

So gen AI is a new iteration of this, we can do these things better, and then it also unlocks other opportunities that we didn’t have before. But we have already been working in the space in big ways, and also in very small ways, for years. And 90-plus percent of the innovation that happens at Amazon is like that. It’s just small, iterative, everyday, across all of the businesses, from everyone. And that’s because the company has this environment that puts everyone into the innovation playing field. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah, that gets into my next question pretty well in terms of: what has Amazon done to build that environment? Because when we think about Amazon, it’s very much that way—and appreciate you explaining the innovation, what that means. But just, like, the environment is so key. 

NATALIA FINELLI: Yeah, so there are many things that are unique about the Amazon culture. I think some people may have heard of our leadership principles. They are 16 behaviors that guide how we operate, so it’s very much the core of our culture. 

And I think there are three elements that create this innovation space, and they are embedded in the leadership principles. So the first one is customer obsession. The second one is acting like owners. And the third one is being generally open to failure. So let’s start with customer obsession. I think this is what Amazon is most well-known for. So it’s probably not surprising that it’s, like, the first item on my list. You know, it’s the energy behind our innovation engine. 

We are here to delight our customers. We always look to understand what are our customers’ needs and wants, and how is that going to drive our decisions for products and for our roadmap? 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah. 

NATALIA FINELLI: And I want to give an example here, like a shameless plug, which is the launch of Amazon Pay on Stripe, which I think is an amazing example of that, which we launched last year. 

So Amazon Pay, if a business wanted to offer Amazon Pay prior to this launch, they needed to create an account with Amazon, integrate with Amazon, manage it separately, and so on. And this is still possible; it’s the product. But we were hearing from our customers more and more about partners, specifically partners such as Stripe, that were doing a great job at simplifying their lives, right? They simplified their payments and financial needs, and it’s all super easy. “And wouldn’t it be great if I could also enable Amazon Pay really simply?” And we agreed. “Yeah, it would be amazing. Like, we want that for you.” 

So, you know, that’s what we did. We got together to figure out, like, how to make that happen. How do we make it easy for the customer, but retain the features of Amazon Pay? And after a long process, which we’re familiar with, we got there.

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah,  I was part of that launch. And it was incredible to see, you know, being in market for, what, ten years—Amazon Pay was in market for ten years—just the speed at which listening to those customers and deciding, “Hey we need to change our business model a bit here because we were going to miss out on this customer opportunity,” and their, just, listening to that feedback is so important. 

NATALIA FINELLI: Yeah, exactly. So when you are innovating, just by listening to your customer, you were really unconstrained by this thinking of, “Well, this is how the product works,” or, “Well, but this is how the architecture works.” I’m like, “Yeah, okay, so now we need another one.” 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah.

NATALIA FINELLI: Because that’s what the customer wants. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Right, yeah, yeah. All right, the other two pillars were empowering—or enabling empowerment. Yeah.

NATALIA FINELLI: Yeah, yeah. 

So yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg said in his keynote, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” I mean, it’s not his quote, but I think it’s a great embodiment of what we’re going to say next, which is, “Oh, it’s great to be customer-obsessed, but how do you execute on it?” So ownership, I think, is the second element that I want to talk about. 

At Amazon, we have this thing where everybody has their favorite leadership principle, you know, and then we use it as, like, icebreaker questions and things like that. So my favorite leadership principle is ownership. Because it’s extremely freeing to think that you are here representing your customer, and you are just looking and poking at any opportunity wherever they are, regardless of whether you own the resources or it’s in your team or not; you are here for the customer.

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah.

NATALIA FINELLI: And I think a way that we executed it really well was actually in my previous role on Fulfillment by Amazon. One of the things that my team did was run a satisfaction survey, as you do. We ran the survey, we published the results, but that’s just the first part of the process. Now, the interesting work is now where we took these results, and then we took that around to all of the owners, everyone that worked a piece of the customer experience, sat with them, asked for insights, and then asked to see their roadmap. 

“Is your roadmap aligned to what the customer is saying?” And if it wasn’t, that’s where we would have the debates. And we did all of that during our annual planning cycle. So I didn’t own any SDs. I didn’t own any resources in operations or supply chain. But my team had this unique view of the customer as a whole, and we would then take these ideas and opportunities, make them our own, and go fight for them. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty amazing—I mean, working with you and the team, you really felt that; like, everyone that I worked with on the team. How do you as a leader make sure that that’s conveyed or just, sort of, empower everyone on the team to feel that level of ownership? And I feel like that’s difficult, especially at a massive company like Amazon. 

NATALIA FINELLI: Yeah, I think that the first thing is you need to give clarity and direction. Like, everyone needs to be clear where they are, where we are going. All right? So every team does tenets or mission, vision—like, whatever you want to call it. And that is long-term. And then we are all aligned in one direction. 

And I think the vision that unifies us all—you know, the one vision to rule them all—is the Amazon Flywheel. It’s a neat concept. You can Google it. There’s a little drawing. But at its core, it’s a positive feedback loop that has in its center the things that we believe will always be true, or that we believe that customers will always want. Right?

So, for example, I don’t think at any point someone will say, “Amazon is great, but I just wish I didn’t find everything I needed there.” This is never going to happen. And that is why for 30 years we’ve been working on adding selection and adding everything that we can possibly add to Amazon, and we will likely continue to be working on it for the next 30 years or more. 

Wherever that may take us, right? Because customers’ behavior may change, and where is this all going? Yeah, we are going to continue pursuing that, because that is our long-term vision. And doing things fully knowing that some of them may not work out and they’re going to fail. Which takes me to my last point, which is the openness to fail. 

Which is—I think out of the three things, is the one thing that as leaders and as innovators, it is the one thing that requires us more to, like, introspect. Because I don’t think it comes natural. We all have goals, and we all have ambitions, and we have career aspirations. We are just not okay with failing. 

So for you to create this level of comfort takes a little bit of time. At Amazon, we have a mechanism for that, which is a “one-way, two-way” door framework. And by the way, we actually talk like that. When we sit, we have conversations. “Is this a one-way door, or is this a two-way door?” But essentially, a two-way door is a decision that if it doesn’t work, or if you don’t like the outcome for any reason, you can just walk back from it, easy. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah. Is there an example, and we were talking about this a little bit yesterday, of—I think often you hear that framework, it’s easy to say, “Yeah, a one-way, two-way door,” but you get still stuck of feeling like it might be a one-way door—and so examples are sort of guardrails you give to the team to make sure that, “Hey, most decisions or these types of decisions are more two-way”? 

NATALIA FINELLI: Yeah. I think there’s a risk of thinking that a two-way door can only be a very small thing. And that is actually not true. A majority of things that we do on the day-to-day is a two-way door. So as an example, last year we launched—Amazon Pay launched—an embedded food ordering experience on Amazon.com. And that is, wow, like a big thing, you know, for us to do. Super new. We were very excited. We thought it was a great opportunity. 

Some debates started to arise. But then we thought, “This is actually a two-way door.” And how you know is you ask yourself, “Okay, if it doesn’t happen, what will I do? What happens next?” “Well, we switch it off.” Or, you know, “I roll back to the previous experience. It’s fine. Like, it’s okay.” So even something like that, we highly consider it a two-way door, and we just went for it to see what happens. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: It seems like the culture is very much biased to action a bit, as opposed to standing around and waiting for things to come to you. It seems like that was a potentially successful launch. What about when failure does happen, inevitably? Like, you are trying to fail in some—or like, failing fast is that pillar. 

NATALIA FINELLI: Yeah. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: What happens then? 

NATALIA FINELLI: If you fail?

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah. 

NATALIA FINELLI: I think, at this point, this is where my team would say that my favorite quote is, “I never lose. I either win or I learn.” This is from Nelson Mandela. But I say it all the time, repeatedly. I put it on slides. I say it in meetings. Because this is really where you naturalize failure, and you understand the value of failure, which is you learn something from it. 

So surviving a failure gives the impression that—you know, like, this is high psychological pressure. But actually, the real question is, how will I fail well? And which is, how will I learn from this failure? 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Mm-hmm.

NATALIA FINELLI: So there are a few practices at Amazon that have been very useful to me, to my teams. The first one is doing retrospective docs or learning docs. So when a mistake happens or failure happens, we write a document about it, and we love to use the 5 Why methodology to understand the root causes, you know, what happened there. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: With the 5 Whys, can you give an example of that? Yeah. 

NATALIA FINELLI: Yeah. Honestly, like, 5 Why is a very—it originated in manufacturing. It’s a very simple, very straightforward, repetitive methodology where you just keep asking why until you understand what happened. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Got it. 

NATALIA FINELLI: And we have templates and forms and, like, things that help people understand how to write it at Amazon. And there is a really funny example that they give. It’s actually inspired by true events of how to write a very simple 5 Why. 

So some years ago, there was an issue with the Lincoln monument [sic], and it was getting deteriorated. So, okay, why is this happening? Well, the city is using very harsh chemicals to clean it. But why is it happening? Well, because there are a lot of pigeons inside the monument, and there are droppings. Okay, but why? Well, the pigeons are there because they like to eat the spiders, and there are lots of spiders. Why are there lots of spiders? 

Well, there are lots of spiders because there are lots of little flies in there. But why are there lots of little flies? Well, because the light that they are using to illuminate the monument goes off at dusk, and it attracts all of the flights inside the monument. So that was the problem, and they solved it by switching the light on after dark. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. 

NATALIA FINELLI: So that is a simple, kind of funny example, but you can apply it to many situations. You can add a couple of complexities, right, sometimes: oh, why didn’t—some problem happen? You know, there was an outage. Why didn’t the alarm go off? Why did this happen, why did this happen? 

But it’s essentially the same. So, we figure out what the root cause is. This is a very common mechanism. We review with teams and across teams. And it’s actually very humanizing because we don’t put any names in it. There’s no finger pointing. We’re not looking for who caused the problem. We’re looking for where the process is broken that this problem happened, and then we fix the problem. What are the actions to fix it? 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, it resonates a lot in terms of just trying to get to a deeper level of understanding, and also speaks to sort of empowering the team to also become an expert in their field. And so, if you can’t answer those questions, you probably don’t understand, really, what’s going on. 

NATALIA FINELLI: Yeah, exactly. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah.

NATALIA FINELLI: And I think—so the second thing is, as a leader, it is also your job to create a safe space, and create trust in the process with the team, just by showing up. 

And it’s not about minimizing the problem and saying it’s okay. It’s about really showing up, helping the team sitting on the floor, helping solve the problem, and really making sure that you communicate that we are on the same team. 

For me, it’s been learning over the years. Because in the beginning, I couldn’t really hide my frustration when something happened. But I learned a lot, and I was really inspired by some very tenured, very senior leaders at Amazon that had huge responsibilities and still had so much grace. You know, they’re sitting with you, with the analyst to figure out what happened, and giving all their support. And it was super inspiring. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah, yeah. That’s awesome. As you were sharing that, I’m thinking about, like, there’s almost sometimes a cliche a bit of failing fast and saying, like, failure is okay, which your point around, like, creating a safe culture resonates. But what about, like, failures that shouldn’t have been done? Like, how do you think about the two different failures where there’s, like, good failures and bad failures? Any thoughts there? 

NATALIA FINELLI: Yeah, that’s a good question, because I don't want to give the impression that we’re like, “Oh, failure!”

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah, “It’s just awesome.” Yeah, right. Yeah.

NATALIA FINELLI: Yeah. No. So we think of failures as opportunities to learn. So how can a failure be an opportunity to learn? It’s when you have a certain level of preparation when you’re going into it. All right, you have a mental model, you have assumptions, you have expectations of what’s going to happen. You don’t need to spend weeks and weeks and weeks on it, but you need to spend a little bit of time thinking about what you think is going to happen. 

And then, if it goes wrong, you can go back to your assumptions and understand what exactly was the assumption that went wrong. So we do not encourage experimentation or people just to go out and do things, just out of nowhere, right? We want to know, like, “What’s your thinking behind it? What are you expecting to happen?”

And actually, the opposite is also true. Sometimes you can do something that works, but you don’t know why. Because you didn’t have a mental model before. You didn’t know what your assumptions were. So now you don’t know what to do next, because you don’t know what worked and what didn’t work. And sometimes some things work and some things don’t work. Or conversely, you don’t hit the goal, but there were several of the assumptions that got confirmed in the process. And that’s also okay. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Right. You don’t want to scrap the whole project just because one of the assumptions that you had wasn’t right or changed throughout the process. And you can make that tweak, as opposed to just viewing the whole thing as a failure. 

NATALIA FINELLI: Exactly. In order for a project—either a failure or a success—to be a learning, you need to have a little bit of thinking before you go. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Be very intentional about what—

NATALIA FINELLI:  Be intentional. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah. Yeah, totally. Okay. We’ve talked a lot about failure. What about success? What do you think success goes—or like when you have a successful project, when innovation goes well, what does that look like? 

NATALIA FINELLI: Yeah. Well, first of all, your customers are delighted. I love this word because it’s so uplifting. But that’s it. Like, you launch a product, your customers are using it, you’re getting positive feedback, the anecdotes are great. The team that has worked on it is energized, like, has tons of ideas, and everybody sees themselves as innovators. So at the first level, that’s it. 

But when you’re thinking about, like, as an innovation leader, how do you know that you are being successful, I think you’re really looking for a flow of ideas, a flow of innovation. It’s not something that happens one-off. It’s something that is a habit, right? And it keeps coming up in the team. You keep having new ideas and more ideas. Repetitive exposure. 

It’s really important because you learn to recognize patterns. And we love debates, so we want everyone to have ideas and come up with debates. And when you debate those ideas, you usually come up with better ideas on the other side. 

So it’s a very dynamic engine, a flywheel, if you will. And in this way, you can have everyone participate in this movement, in whatever level they are in the organization, and have exposure to, like, this “thinking big” mentality. 

It’s a bit of a misconception that—okay, the thing is called “thinking big.” It’s another leadership principle. So I wouldn’t blame, you know, if someone thinks that it’s about having huge ideas. But that’s a misconception. Because thinking big is more about this habit of always thinking about what is the next step; what is the next thing that I can improve; what is the next thing that I can do better? And that can happen at any level, right? It can happen at a portfolio level, but it can also happen, like, at a simple flow—workflow, customer experience, one customer experience. 

So as an innovation leader, I think success looks like this dynamic movement where everybody is a part of, and everybody gets exposed and can learn the process, and to be an innovator. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah, totally. It gets back to what you said at the beginning about what innovation is, and it’s like daily, “Just work at it.” And I think, often, myself and others, we can get paralyzed a bit by this “think big” concept of, “Oh man, I need to create the next major update,” or something like that. And instead, like, innovation can be smallish and—start small and get big over time. So that’s really great to hear. 

NATALIA FINELLI: It’s a skill development process. You can’t expect to start already with an idea that’s going to shift the foundations of the earth. You start small, understand your space. The more you get into it, the better you understand your customers, so the more you are able to think bigger and bigger. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: That’s what, I think—the Amazon Pay transition to direct to then more partnering a bit more with PSPs also feels like that to some degree, of like listening in over time and making some small tweaks and improvements and then, “Okay, hey, like, we have enough here, so let’s move forward.”

NATALIA FINELLI: Yeah.

ZACK CIESINSKI: Cool. Any final bits of wisdom or tactical things that we can take away?

NATALIA FINELLI: Yeah. So, success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. Also not from me. Winston Churchill said that. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Some good quotes here. 

NATALIA FINELLI: And I say it sometimes half as a joke, half as not a joke. Because innovation is hard. It is hard work. It is tireless. It’s relentless. 99% is like blood, sweat, and tears; and things are going to go wrong anyway, no matter how hard you work. So you need to have a certain attitude, you know, a certain resilience to it. 

For me, I take energy and have, yeah, a service-oriented mindset. I’m here to serve my customers, and I’m happy when I’m able to make the world happy. But if you don’t feel like you are in this flow yet, you can always start with one experience for one customer or one customer segment, and start there. 

There’s an exercise that we do on Amazon usually once a year. It’s called a 3YP planning, or a three-year plan. And this is the time when we get together, we write documents about big ideas, and we get together to discuss them. And it’s often like that. It’s like one experience, one thing that we want to do for the customer that seems really big; we get together to discuss. Very often it derives other small things that we can do in the process. And that’s sort of how you get the ball going. And anyone can do that at any moment. 

So I think that that is the biggest takeaway for me. It’s very easy to—or I think it’s very common to think that innovating and being an innovative company at the level of the big innovative companies in the world, it’s like, oh, you need to be a genius. Like, you need to be one of those geniuses and have huge ideas that are going to change the world. But you don’t. That’s what I learned at Amazon. You don’t. You don’t need to be a genius. 

Thank God. You can do great work every day, and learn about your customer and continue iterating, and over a period of time, you’re going to look back and you’re going to be amazed with what you did. 

ZACK CIESINSKI: Yeah. Yeah. Showing up every day, moving forward. Thank you so much. You’ve demystified a lot of the term “innovation,” I think. And that’s been super helpful. So thank you for being here. Thank you all for joining. If you want to learn more from Natalia, you can see her at the booth. Thank you.