There’s not an awful lot new or surprising in this memo from Amazon leadership about the role of AI in software engineering, but it’s still interesting to see companies starting to codify the things that remain incredibly important for engineers (and product people!) to focus on. From real and continued first hand experience:
As a technical or organizational leader, part of your job is making sure that your team or organization is using AI to the best effect to improve delivery for customers and your business. That requires deeply understanding these technologies yourself, working with them hands-on rather than relying on what you hear, and understanding how others are using them. Sufficient understanding means you have used these tools on your production work, can describe a task where they helped and a task where they did not, and can explain that judgement to your team.
To the importance of staying close to customer needs:
We have also found that [Software Development Engineers] and [Software Development Managers] who are closer to their products and businesses are able to take the most advantage of AI and agentic software development. As Amazon has grown, we’ve seen some of our ICs and SDMs become less connected to their customers and business. We want to reverse this trend. We recommend that ICs of all levels find ways to become deeply connected to your customers, and your team or org’s product direction. As always, the scope and depth of this ownership will increase as you become more senior.