Today at Big Technology, we’re continuing our series where Amazon veteran Kristi Coulter examines the company’s strategy and trajectory after working there for twelve years.
This week, Coulter looks at the company’s shifting leadershipteam, and what it indicates about its direction. As you’ll see below, the S-Team has grown meaningfully after Jeff Bezos left, and its new divisions are outflanking the old Amazon Classic operation.
By Kristi Coulter
At an Amazon all-hands in 2017, an employee asked Jeff Bezos why the “S-Team,” Amazon’s nickname for his circle of closest advisers, was composed almost entirely of white guys. Jeff’s response: because most of the seventeen S-team members (sixteen men and one woman) were long-tenured Amazonians, and there was very little turnover. “I would expect any transition there to happen very incrementally over a long period of time,” he said.
It wasn’t much of an answer, but it was factually correct. At the time, the average S-team member had been at Amazon for fifteen years, and membership was fairly static, comprising Jeff’s direct reports and a handful of other top executives. During my twelve years at Amazon (2006-2018), a couple of additions or changes to the S-team happened every year or two, but nothing particularly radical, either functionally or demographically.
Now though, the S-Team is changing — dramatically — and the shifts point to a company whose future is wildly different than Bezos’s Amazon. Under Andy Jassy, Amazon’s cloud services, content, and logistics are new, rising priorities, as made evident by his S-Team composition. While retail, though still present, is heading toward retrenchment. To consider where this company is heading, let’s do some Amazon Kremlinology.
Since Andy Jassy’s rise to CEO in 2021, the S-team has nearly doubled in size, and 40% of its members have had title changes, not something Amazon does on a whim. ...
