Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. There are many ways to center a business. Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making. I don’t know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. There will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps. Such a question can’t have a simple answer. I’m interested in the question, how do you fend off Day 2? What are the techniques and tactics? How do you keep the vitality of Day 1, even inside a large organization? An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come. To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me.
I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting.
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