Goodbye Amazon

Reflecting on 20 Years

Eric French - FBA OP1 2014

As I get ready to retire from Amazon - I wanted to take the opportunity to look back on my time here (20 years, 11 months) as well as my career generally, call out some key career transitions and offer a few thoughts about what Amazon has meant to me, what I have learned, how and why I’ve been here as long as I have and my advice for those that continue.

And if you think this is too long - just use AI to summarize it for you. :)

As I’ve contemplated “my when to leave” - I’ve had this letter open in a file for a while and I’ve come back to it time and again to write this out. I’ve wanted to make sure that I tried to capture my thoughts accurately from all the angles.

First off - Amazon is stage 3 of my tech career that began during graduate school. I never meant to get into tech - I was originally heavily engaged in trying to figure out what to do with my under graduate degree in history. I often felt lost early in my mid 20s when I was struggling to figure out what I’d be when I grew up. Originally I had an idea to be a professor - to get a PHD in History and to teach…. But after returning from Taiwan, where I’d studied Chinese and finally got my BA in History via independent study in 1993 - and after deciding not to join the military or take the manager job at Sbarro’s in the Mall - I went back to graduate school. I loved my graduate program but I was recognizing (albeit slowly) that a PhD was going to be another 6 years and that professorship might be tough to get a job that would be able to support my family.

And then I got completely lucky and fell into technology. While in the graduate program in Asian Studies I was an assistant to Dr. William J. Hamblin, and then the World Wide Web launched (1995) and Hamblin asked me to build a website with clickable image maps showing the growth of the Assyrian Empire. That started me down the path of figuring out how to build websites, which led me to my first “tech job”at Nu Skin in Provo Utah and that continued a pattern that has been consistent my entire life : curiosity, learn something new, do something new and keep going. I have always been driven by a creative desire to understand the world around me, a desire to learn - from reading the Encyclopedia as a child, or browsing many thin yellow volumes of the National Geographic : this curiosity persisted throughout my work. Maybe my attitude, my effort and my energy helped but I didn’t plan to end up here - though I’m grateful for everything I’ve had the opportunity to do. From Nu Skin I got a job at the startup WebLogic in San Francisco (a separate interesting journey working with some of the brightest minds in Java and distributed computing). I continued with BEA Systems (that acquired WebLogic) for 6 more years and we eventually moved with them up to Seattle.

We moved to Issaquah outside Seattle in April of 2004; when I returned from my first backpacking trip in August I got a voice mail telling me that BEA was closing the Seattle office and I started interviewing. Brent Curtis got me an introduction at Amazon - I was late for my coffee chat with Charlie Bell at Pac Med - I must have passed because I met my hiring manager Andrew Certain at Starbucks in Factoria - where he handed me something called a PRFAQ - a doc that described a new product offering at Amazon that he owned called Self Service Ordering and Fulfillment (SSOF). Andrew arranged an interview - Paul Kotas was my bar raiser. I was offered two roles - both Technical Program Manager (TPM) positions. One was working for Andrew on SSOF and the other was working for Tim Craycroft who ran the Program Office - where I’d be working on a large cross functional program to deprecate the Single Detail Page merchants program that sold BMVD and merge it with the more “modern” M@ Merchants system. I was leaning towards the latter as it sounded challenging but Charlie Bell suggested that I take the role working for Andrew on SSOF.

I started at Amazon in Feb of 2005. I was hire # 3 on the Self Service Ordering and Fulfillment (SSOF) team - my 2nd day at Amazon I was in a Jeff Bezos meeting where we reviewed the state of SSOF. Jeff wanted us to go faster. They still hadn’t started building anything - I was supposed to help with that. The PM (Josh Sandbulte) quit Amazon a few weeks after I started, and I recall him stating he was glad that he’d never have to meet with Jeff again. (Josh seemed like he was stuck in analysis paralysis - something Jeff did not tolerate). I was initially assigned to help launch a new Merchant : Bebe on Amazon’s dot.com systems. Amazon would run the website and would also handle the fulfillment of orders. No one had done a fulfillment program since Target launched as a website on Amazon systems with fulfillment in 2002. My job was to figure out how to make fulfillment work for Bebe and then take that learning and apply it to SSOF. In July, 5 months after I started my hiring manager (Andrew Certain) took a leave of absence. That left me as the sole team member of SSOF, and then Tom Taylor was assigned to own the SSOF program. He brought in a Principal TPM - Chad Goelzer to run fulfillment Ops, Principal Engineer John Chenault to figure out systems. I was to leverage my Bebe learnings and go figure out how to make ordering work. Tom quickly hired a 3rd TPM - Dipika Kapadia to work on Seller experience and Joe Walowski as our first PM. Tom prioritized, he simplified, he cut features and focused us in a singular direction : to launch by 12/31/2005. We had 5 sellers to start. I drove out to Issaquah to label and load books of one of those sellers (Grassroots Books) to ship to RNO1. We launched in April of 2006 - and we quickly renamed the program to Fulfillment by Amazon.

FBA started off super small. We quickly signed up another 15 sellers but there were a lot of missing features (no inventory view, no view of orders, no returns, no fees etc etc). So we paused while we built some key features. At the end of 2006, Bezos had us set a goal for “# of merchants we would launch on FBA in 2007.” I think we came up with 1500. Jeff came back that we should do 25,000! That was a lesson to focus on self service. Jeff emphasized that a seller should be able to come to the Seller website, sign up, read the docs, and use the seller portal to create an inbound shipment and send in inventory to Amazon’s warehouse all without ever talking to a person. We missed the 25K, but we hit our stride on self service and as Prime launched and FBA inventory qualified to be branded as Prime, the program really took off.

I was promoted to Principal TPM in Oct of 2006 - I remember being shocked because Tom just called me into my office and informed me. We’d never discussed career development - I guess he thought I was quickly working at that level after joining and helping launch FBA. In some ways this messed up my mental model for career progression - as I expected my next promotion would take place the same way : it would just happen. I was mistaken - more on that later.

For the next 3-4 years I kept on taking on large complicated projects within the FBA space. Launching FBA in UK and Japan. Launching Multi Channel Fulfillment (MCF : ability to tell Amazon to ship an item of your inventory in our warehouse to any address - typically because it sold on another website), Launching Joyo.com in China integrated with Amazon FC systems via MCF. I resisted being a manager - even though I recognized later that they tried. They had me hire a writer early on to work on FBA Seller help docs - he reported to me. But he was a bit odd - I guess he had back problems - so he brought in a camping sleeping pad, and screwed his monitor to the bottom of a door desk and would lay underneath on the pad flat on his back while staring up at the screen and typing on keyboard. Not that someone couldn’t produce great results with that setup - but he did not produce great docs in copious amounts and was caught sleeping a couple of times. And I couldn’t get up the courage to give him feedback on his performance. Someone else had to take over helping him find employment elsewhere.

Eventually in 2010 - we got a new tech Director : Adrian Inglis and I moved to report to him. I had “hired” internally another L7 Principal TPM (the fabulous Lorraine Nicholson), and I was ostensibly in name a Manager of one person who didn’t require any management. Adrian said to me - “Next year we are going to make you into a real manager, none of this fake manager stuff.” - Adrian had a way of being very direct, very blunt and pushing me to grow. He probably had more to do with my career growth at Amazon than anyone else. I had another SDE Nancy Walsh transition over to being a TPM reporting to me. Then I finally convinced Eric Gregory to come work for me - we had worked together on the Bebe launch. And I convinced Ben Lee, who I had met during the Joyo launch to also come work for me on FBA. We had a small and mighty team of 4 and we got stuff done!

By this time I was committed to management - Adrian gave me a ton of feedback and I was asking him about my next transition - to L7 Software Development Manager. Adrian kept acknowledging his support but also emphasized that this was a move that required timing and planning. While the overall number of direct reports would be similar in size - the scope of the role - a manager of managers and the total number of the overall team would dramatically increase. Finally I hit upon the idea of : “Why not send Mark to Beijing to manage the software engineers there?” We had hired a bunch of engineers to work on FBA, while being situated in Beijing. After discussion in talent review and being approved by Tom and finance - me and my wife Stacey and our 2 kids (Sofi age 10 and Miles age 7) were set to move to Beijing in Feb of 2011.

What a grand adventure, both professionally and personally. 3 weeks after I arrived in Beijing, the one software manager quit and I was left with a team of about 13 engineers all reporting to me. I quickly had to hire a manager, and upgrade some of the team. When we left 18 months later, I had hired 3 managers, Wang Lei as my replacement and had built the team to around 22 engineers. I came back to Seattle to a much larger role - and under Adrian’s tutelage began to understand that moving up to Tech Director was a step change in how I operated and managed.

At Amazon we often think of levels as +1 increments, going from 5 to 6 or 7 to 8. In reality these moves are exponential jumps in responsibilities, expectations and execution. Key things that I learned in getting promoted to Director in April of 2014. First people are your product. You still deliver stuff, but more through others. You must always be hiring and developing - your ability to scale as a leader is only as good as the leaders you have on your team and them in turn. Second, managing people is messy and that means you have to roll up your sleeves, solve human interaction issues and to clean up messes. That means being willing and able to give feedback, good and constructive and deal with performance issues and the HR process of improvement or separation. Third - you have to partner and be willing to say yes, lean in and figure out how to get stuff done. Coming from a TPM / Engineering background - I was reluctant to commit before measuring twice : “Not sure if we can hit that goal, I need to get final requirements, estimate scoping and then look at our budget and let you know.” - When really what your business partners are looking for is “Yes, we will figure it out.” - or good very detailed reason to push back based on principle, data, customer feedback etc. Lastly - I learned that you had to, and were expected to toughen up, to push others to higher standards and to do more; to invent and simplify, to be creative in approaches to problems. I never had a problem pushing myself to do this - but it was a new thing to be comfortable to engage others under your direct leadership to do this. And to build mechanisms to do it at scale.

Another couple of key lessons in career that came out of FBA - first the importance of staying in a place where you can build career equity. This of course can be highly dependent on an organization that is growing with good managers who support your growth. And FBA grew like crazy. I stayed with FBA for 9 years because I had opportunities to grow as the program grew : I went from an IC to a manager, from line manager to manager of managers to Director of Software Engineering. The other key lesson, and a guiding principle of how I work (and this was re-enforced by Tom Taylor) - is that you can work hard, make history and have a lot of fun. We had a great team culture in FBA : with beer Fridays, contests (donut eating, pushups), nerf battles, lunch runs, polar plunges etc etc. What a lucky break it was to be able to join FBA - an opportunity to build a startup inside of Amazon that has grown to have such a meaningful impact on the store, attracted millions of sellers, delivered value to 100s of millions of customers; a program that has shipped 80 billion units via FBA.

6 months after my promotion to Director, I went to work with Amazon Pay (a simple way to think of Amazon Pay is Amazon’s version of Paypal) and I ran the tech teams that built systems that helped enable 3rd party payments on Sellers websites. Like FBA, I had the opportunity to learn and grow. I loved learning about the entire payments infrastructure, the “value chain” of the payments execution and the way the ecosystem worked : issuing banks, card brands, disputes and transactions. Ever wonder how “Tap and Pay” works underneath the covers? Eventually I was given the opportunity to manage new roles and learn new skills - in addition to engineering I also led data, design and product management. Two key lessons I learned at Pay - first organizational structure and composition creates unique dynamics and skews focus and priorities. In Pay, my peers were 3 sales directors and a director of marketing - in my opinion this tended to skew priorities toward closing deals or creating opportunities in market expansion through partnership or integration which overshadowed the Amazon principle of ‘working backwards’ from the customer. Secondly - I learned how challenging it is to sell a product to customers (sellers) - where your solution is not solving 100% of their needs. With Amazon Pay - we were generally an add on to Sellers websites and their existing primary payments solutions; even if we became a 100% of their payments solution we were a bolt on to their existing check out flow. Both of these created unique challenges with adoption and scaling. Finally I learned that your impact is highest when you are fully aligned with your leadership and thus I sought a new different environment and challenge. I think this is one of the best things about Amazon : the company has such a broad set of initiatives you can find new challenges and opportunities to grow and learn and Amazon encourages and welcomes people trying new things.

In looking for my next role - I wanted to get back to something where physics and moving actual stuff was involved. I naturally gravitated back towards fulfillment. I met Steve Armato at a bar after work and we chatted - he suggested I talk to Peter Larsen - who proposed a role leading MFN Fulfillment (where sellers operate the own warehouses and ship item with 3rd party carriers like UPS and FedEx) - though he said it did have some issues that would require care and special attention and focus. I recall calling Eric Broussard on a Saturday while trail running to talk to him about the opportunity. There is a circular twist of ironic fate - when I joined Amazon - my hiring manager owned Merchant Fulfillment software systems : MFN and was tasked with expanding those systems to enable Fulfillment By Amazon. I was a TPM assigned with figuring out FBA - and that program grew to transition a large part of the merchant shipments from MFN to FBA. In my opinion, this resulted in a bit of languished attention on MFN - and then 15 years later - I was to become the owner of MFN fulfillment.

I moved over in February of 2020. 10 days later Covid hit the US - we went home to work for 21 days and stayed there for roughly 3 years. MFN, which was growing in the US in low single digits annually, suddenly was growing at high double digit rates. In April 2020 MFN shipped more units than during Peak 2020. There was immense pressure to improve the MFN experience. We worked a LOT of hours. I had the “opportunity” for weekly meetings with 2 SVPs, and bi-weekly meetings with then CEO Dave Clark. We were directed by Clark to go look at an acquisition - to help sellers with fulfillment on all their sales channels - not just Amazon. In Jan of 2021 - we had our first discovery call with Matt Warren of Veeqo and in Nov - after 9 very intense long months we closed the Veeqo acquisition. Then we had the hard work of integrating Veeqo into Amazon, and adapting our fulfillment to handle off-Amazon shipments and wiring up Veeqo to use our Buy Shipping program. I learned so much throughout the process and it was a lot of fun helping a great company on-board to Amazon.

In 2025, in conjunction with a re-org - where MFN moved out of Ops transportation and integrated with External Fulfillment - I took a smaller role running just product - so that I could have more bandwidth and space to help out my wife and her health. And now the time has come to step away entirely from Amazon and start a new chapter outside of work.

Looking back I want to highlight some of key improvements the team has made in MFN fulfillment. I’ll use the US as my primary example, since I have the most familiarity, though these changes were also reflected world wide. I will try to use 2019 as a comparison to 2025. During Covid (2020) things got very skewed by the way everything shifted to ecommerce, so 2020 is not a good comp. The MFN fulfillment experience that Sellers provide for customers has a bunch of different components - how fast is the promise of delivery, what are the tools used to generate the delivery promise and what % of the promises are “fast”. Some of the key areas that had big improvements :

Handling Time - the length of time a seller takes to pick and pack the order and hand off to carrier.

In 2019 9.4% of sellers had 1D HT and in mid year 2025 1D HT configuration was 71.4%

Promise Automation - Some background : In 2019 0% of the transit times in MFN promises were automated. We used very coarse grained ranges (5-7 days) that were not precise. In 2020 we launched transit time automation, which calculated and optimized the carrier transit times for a zip5 origin to zip5 destination - for precise and accurate promises. These were much more accurate than manual transit times and were a better (faster) customer shopping experience - which produced better shopping conversion for MFN Sellers. In 2019 0% of the transit times were automated - in 2025 45% of promises were automated.

Buy Shipping - a product that lets sellers purchase shipping labels where Amazon provides negotiated rates, and predicts which shipping services will meet customer promise. In 2019 Buy Shipping US Adoption was 26.4% and by the end of 2025 that had grown to 38%.

We measure the speed or the length of the promise in days - which we internally call Click to Promise or C2P. In 2019 the C2P was 12.4 days, that is the average MFN promise was 12.4 days long and in 2025 the C2P was 8.6 days, a 30% improvement.

We also shifted more of the promises to be faster : in 2019 ~15% of the promises were between 6-8 days and in 2025 that number had increased to 45.4%

I also owned improving the Prime experience where sellers shipped Prime orders via MFN : (Seller Fulfilled Prime - SFP). One of Prime’s main benefits is FREE Two-Day Delivery, with Prime shipping speeds increasingly shipping in one-day. In 2019 the % of SFP promises at 1Day speed was 1% and 2Day speed was 14%. In 2025, 35% of SFP promises were 1D and 79.8% were 2Days. A dramatic improvement in the Prime customer shopping experience with SFP.

Taking an even wider view across everything I’ve had the opportunity to do while at Amazon : What am I most proud of? Of course I am proud of what I was able to work on and what I have learned and what “I” singular-achieved -which in the end is not really THAT much : everything at Amazon is a stacked set of dependencies and interconnecting services and individuals working as teams to produce something amazing. What makes me proud is the people I’ve had the chance to work with, the teams I’ve had the opportunity to lead and a hope that along the way I’ve made things a bit better in my fellow employees lives and through Amazon the world in general. Two projects that stand out above all the rest : 1) being involved in the launch of Fulfilment By Amazon and 2) being able to work on the acquisition of Veeqo.

How have I stayed so long? How have I “survived”? Amazon is a high demand company, not known as an easy place to work and not a place to coast. Amazon has a high hiring bar, and high expectations for how someone conducts themselves and high expectations on what people deliver. Here is my distilled advice and wisdom :

Amazon has a sense of urgency to it that can be all encompassing; As Jeff said “Speed in Business Matters” - and that has this way of creating the expectation that everything you’re working on is the most important thing and that it must be done with speed. Answer that email that comes in fwd from Jassy (rightfully) questioning an anecdote from a Seller. Figure out how to achieve the S-Team goal that you signed up for because of the importance of the program you’re working on. How can you go faster? (An oft repeated question). That is part of your job; part of why you were hired and that is the part of the force multiplier in leadership positions : The CEOs, The Senior Vice Presidents, the Vice Presidents and Directors are there to empower, focus and enable their teams to deliver.

But - if you are not careful - you can get ground down, or you can get overwhelmed with anxiety or burn out. You must be ruthless at prioritization, you must focus on what really matters and where you can make a difference. You can spend all day writing and replying to emails but not be doing the most important work. Protect your time at work; But also protect the time that is yours outside of work and the time to be with your families or significant others. Learn how to and when to let go of work; there is ALWAYS more work to be done but you should not always have to be working. If you do - you will burn out. I have been there and I have seen many people in that state. You must be careful about how much of your life you give to work and when you do so be conscious of that decision. Some people’s hobby is work; some people are defined by work - those are personal choices that are not necessarily wrong - but you should be aware of the choices you are making and why.

Build time to think. Build time to recharge. Build time to de-stress. For me that has always been the outdoors - hiking or running before work. In the last 10 years, I always run to start my day before work; no matter what time pressure I had on my morning - I’d just get up earlier to get my run in. 7 am meeting? 90 minute run on the schedule? Set the alarm for 4:30 and get out the door by 5 am and be ready to roll for that 7 am meeting. And after you have run a 100 miles in one go - you can push through a lot of tough things at work.

If you are a manager - protect your team. Care for them and their interests; don’t coddle them or let them deliver to low standards. Be genuine. Be Straightforward. Trust your instincts; dive in when necessary - the details always matter and they illuminate the way that gets lost in the aggregate or the average. My organization philosophy has always been - hire great people based on Amazon’s high standards of thought, execution and leadership skills. Give them ownership and responsibility, empower them with lofty goals and set them up with great leadership who are empowered to do the same. Audit deeply and regularly to check in on progress at all levels. CARE deeply about your employees development, success and give them feedback and support to grow and adapt and achieve. Motivate through self development, customer obsession and achievements - not through fear or by manipulation. Be fair; be equitable.

I believe that the highest ideal we can achieve is to be an inspiration for someone to live a better life and inspire them to inspire others. I have perhaps enjoyed the most developing others; helping them grow, watching them learn, achieve and excel. To develop their own skills as individuals or as managers. To see them gain experience; to give them feedback, to give them suggestions and direction; to coach them and to help them achieve success and become better employees.

Lastly, as I have mentioned before, have fun. Curiosity about what you’re doing makes everything more interesting. Learning is fun and almost everything is interesting if you go deep enough. I enjoy solving hard problems; I enjoy figuring out a way through; those that enjoy the process are more likely to succeed because they are more likely to keep going when things get challenging. I value honesty; I value truth seeking; I value commitment and delivery. It is not easy to do the hard things but it’s impossible to do the things you don’t set out to attempt. I’m awe struck at the many amazing things that Amazon has built.

What defines success in a career? Certainly one yard stick used is promotion : At Amazon being promoted at higher levels is both recognition of career growth and is a matter of timing : opportunity and luck. You need to be in a position long enough that there is opportunity for you and your team to demonstrate completing career promoteable results, and you have to be capable AND you and your boss and those around you (feedback providers) have to be motivated to document and affirm both results and capabilities. Sometimes you’re not capable, sometimes you’re not motivated, sometimes your boss is not, sometimes circumstances don’t line up. And sometimes you choose not to. My own career trajectory involved different mixes of all of those. Don’t ignore your career, but people can’t feel that the only thing motivating you is career progression.

In my last year - I would at times feel a surreal sense of being able to see the end - floating above it all - another month ticked by and less than 12 months remained and now days. How could that be after spending an entire lifetime of working with no specific required date as the end? And I have had some worries about whether I will matter without work. Will anyone need me and my time and my attention each and every day in the same way that Amazon has “needed me” during my time; especially as a Director. I have given my ALL to Amazon for 8 hours+ a day for a long time - but I’ve never given it everything - that is too dangerous - I don’t live to work - I work to live. I work hard; I try to work empathetically and smart and help others - but I am ready to let others carry on. 😉

The graveyards are full of people who thought they were irreplaceable. Just like 1000s of those before me I’ll be gone and you’ll carry on. Keep going!

Closing with the Old Fart statistics

I am employee #1,037
I am older (more tenure) than 99.944% of the company

Cheers
mbg