This post is part of a From The Archives series I am doing to move my posts over from LinkedIn. This was originally posted on December 9, 2023.
ICYMI
ICYMI
In Part 1 of this series, I described the early state of our live-stream program at Amazon Web Services (AWS). In Part 2, I explained where we are today. Part 3 is more philosophical. It will give specific insights into the motivations and strategy behind what we built and where we are headed with the service we are now operating.
This post doesn't represent leadership advice from AWS as a company but is based on the personal insights and best practices I have collected across my career. This includes working at AWS for the past six years.
Stubborn on the vision, flexible on the details.
Lately, the idea of 'having a vision' or 'having a common goal' has been on my mind. It concerns me when managers can't articulate a direction or plan for their team. Maybe the fault lies many levels above them, but this organizational rudderlessness can demoralize or block people from progressing. My team would not have built a Broadcast Control facility, adopted a platform, developed a field operation, and kept daily operations running smoothly without a unifying goal to rally around.
Corporate norms or leadership principles can be foundational to your team goals. Still, they shouldn't be a substitute for leaders defining what those leadership principles mean for their team's mission.
Once our team locked in on a unified vision, we started putting together the details of what deliverables would push us closer to the vision. We also took the time necessary to ensure the team understood the vision and how they would contribute to it individually.
I believe it was Jeff Bezos who said, "We are stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details." My addition to that quote is, "We should never compromise on clarity around the vision." A vision is only impactful if everyone understands and owns a piece of the vision. Speed only matters in a race if the drivers know where the finish line is. Our team should know where they are going before we set out on the track.
Everyone in our team and business unit should understand what our vision is and what it is driving us to accomplish. To support this idea, I designed an internal go-to-market strategy, marketing collateral, and talking points so our team could uniformly communicate our vision to internal all-hands meetings, stakeholders, and other teams who could benefit from our services.
Build until they can't say no.
At the beginning of the AWS Broadcast Control project, we had yet to learn the facility development cost or the technology we would need to support it. We could have let this deter us or push us to take a more cautious 'wait and see' approach.
We decided to take a different approach and start building, or maybe 'bootstrapping' is a better way to describe it.
We took some of our annual operational budgets and funded technical programming, architectural test fits, and mechanical engineering assessments of the facility where we planned to build.
This bootstrapped effort resulted in a more concrete understanding of the cost of developing the facility and the technical equipment needed to make it functional.
These efforts allowed us to have a much more impactful business proposal, which helped us present to our business and finance partners exactly how much the build would cost and how much money it would save the business.
Then came the moment of truth. Would the business fund the development? After six years at AWS, my tolerance for ambiguous situations is high. Waiting on the yes or no after almost a year of planning was one of the most suspenseful times of my tenure at AWS.
Thankfully, I had the North Star of our team vision to guide me, and I believed the vision would remain even if the answer was "no" and details had to change.
Customer Obsessed PCR
Thankfully, the idea of lower operating costs and better customer experiences resulted in us getting our funding approved. We built the facility, including a world-class Master Control Room (MCR). But we also got to create a Production Control Room (PCR) - pictured above.
Our typical event delivery starts with a production team at an event venue handing our team two dirty program feeds. We connect those video handoffs to redundant contribution encoders connected to redundant networks, and those feeds are transmitted to our viewers. For simplicity I am skipping a few hops in the workflow. The MCR allows us to apply decorations, captions, and a Quality Control workflow to live transmissions.
Adding a PCR to this operation gives us another opportunity to up-level the production value across the board for all events, and tailor the live-stream customer (viewer) experience. Even smaller format events can benefit from the big event production values and the viewer benefits from the experience.
We consider the PCR to be a form of customer obsession, which coincidentally is an Amazon leadership principle and part of our vision as a team.