Episode 167: How to Use More Than 10% of Your Company's Brain with Aaron Smith, Chief Product Officer

In this episode of Product Thinking, Aaron Smith joins Melissa Perri. Together, they discuss Aaron’s best practices he learned from his time at Amazon, key leadership principles, creating a culture of accountability, and the destiny creator mindset.

Aaron is the Chief Product Officer of Pattern in Salt Lake City. He joined Pattern back in 2020, bringing his impressive ecommerce and product credentials with him from some of the world’s most successful customer-centric companies such as Amazon, Grubhub, and Nordstrom. Pattern is a leading global ecommerce accelerator, reaching $1 billion revenue in 2022. They are an AI-driven tech platform that accelerates ecommerce growth end-to-end for hundreds of partner brands, such as Google, Skechers and Converse.

Prior to Pattern, Aaron led the Scheduled Delivery, Dropship, and Ops Integration teams at Amazon, creating hundreds of millions in new revenue opportunities and introducing innovative products that improve customer experiences. At Grubhub, Aaron built the consumer product team and a product experience that helped triple gross food sales to $5B and revenues to $1B in 3 years. Aaron holds an MBA from the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University.

You’ll hear them talk about:

1:23 - Amazon is one of the biggest companies in the world, second only to Apple. Aaron shares his experience working at Amazon and what he’s taken with him to other leadership roles. They are customer obsession, use data to drive decision making and are expert planners. Amazon eliminates bureaucracy at the high level. They prioritize flexibility and provide autonomy to its planners. Aaron noticed that being overly committed to one plan can be destructive for companies. Amazon combated this with a result focused approach that’s backed with data: “if you’ve found a more advantageous way, and the data shows it too, then do it. Don’t ask, just do and get the results.”

14:50 - Coming from such a high-performing company such as Amazon comes with an adaptation period. There’s an element of culture shock shared by ex-Amazonians who have switched companies. Although their data-driven and direct leadership approach is effective, Aaron reveals it doesn't always seamlessly fit with other companies' cultures. Coming into another culture and simply trying to make it another version of Amazon quickly descends into plain arrogance. Aaron teaches humility in leadership to his team and instead takes the best of his current and previous work cultures to find the best of both worlds.

19:37 - Aaron’s leadership principle of “pain-point alchemy” prioritizes taking a step back after extracting the pain points and exposing the out-of-the-box opportunities present. It's important to truly understand the customer's pain points and what will make their lives better. This requires listening and understanding what the customer really needs, even when the customer doesn’t know themselves.

38:53 - Curating a truly innovative culture is about consistency. To foster innovation, leaders need to be open to new ideas from their people and not critiquing them for their lack of focus on the current projects. Aaron shares an example of how Amazon successfully embeds innovation into their working cycle, and gives employees a chance to pitch their ideas to the higher ups, called operational planning. If you’re not giving people the opportunity to bring their best ideas to the table, then you’re using 10% of your company's brain.

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Previous guests include: Shruti Patel of US Bank, Steve Wilson of Contrast Security, Bethany Lyons of KAWA Analytics, Tanya Johnson Chief Product Officer at Auror, Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School, Stephanie Leue of Doodle, Jason Fried of 37signals, Hubert Palan of Productboard, Blake Samic of Stripe and Uber, Quincy Hunte of Amazon Web Services

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