Is It the Right Thing to Focus On?

Eugene Choi spent 7 years at Amazon as Finance Director for Retail Softlines and AWS Infrastructure prior to joining the executive teams of Oberto Snacks and Viacom CBS. In this episode, Eugene breaks down how he learned Amazon's input-focused process to uncover business opportunities and deliver results. Eugene shares how leaders can help both free up their teams and better serve customers by having the discipline to not follow competitors but instead focus on the key input drivers of a product or service. Eugene takes us through examples of how he worked backwards to identify the right inputs and later applied this same approach at Oberto Snacks and ViacomCBS and shares how others can adopt this same approach.

More from the episode:

5:45 - Deliver results by focusing on the inputs, not outputs

7:00 - How Amazon senior leaders review weekly performance

8:27 - How AWS focuses on spare-parts expenses as an input to prevent negative customer experiences

10:40 - Why an output focus inadvertently limits customer choice

16:03 - Adopting input-focused diagnosis to challenges outside Amazon

20:40 - The need for discipline and investigation to adopt an input-focused approach

24:07 - How managing by inputs fits into Amazon's "working backwards" approach