Fan Jin’s career lessons: Bring ideas, find magic in data, and don’t limit yourself

My very first interaction with Amazon was as a summer intern between business school years. I’d never lived on the West Coast and thought, “Why not give this tech company a try?”

Two things stood out. First, Seattle’s weather in summer is amazing. I know it has a reputation for rain, but that summer was glorious.

Second, I did a 10-week internship in Consumer Electronics, presented a six-pager with my recommendations for a product idea, and a few months later found out they’d implemented a lot of it.

I was stunned. Most interns don’t expect their work to have real-world impact. But here was a company taking the ideas of someone with relatively little experience and turning them into reality. That sense of empowerment—the fact that individuals can have impact at scale—that’s what brought me to Amazon. And it’s why I’ve stayed.

I’m naturally a builder. Product management is one way to build at Amazon, but in every role I’ve had—vendor management, marketing—there have been opportunities to create something new.

For instance, one year in, I was a vendor manager for televisions. Suddenly, I was building out a whole new direct-import business from China, visiting manufacturers, figuring out quality controls, making huge buying decisions.

Later, when I was in Marketing, we realized people buy more furniture right after they move. It sounds obvious now, but it was new for Amazon at the time. We found the data, built and launched a program that became Amazon Move, and offered discounts to customers in the middle of a house move.

Again and again, I’ve found that if you can see the opportunity and articulate the strategy, Amazon will invest in you to make it real.

Absolutely. The mechanisms for inventing and simplifying are everywhere at Amazon.

Sometimes it’s a big, obvious initiative, like Amazon Autos. Other times, it’s in the details of an existing business. But the mentality is the same; status quo isn’t the goal. If you have that entrepreneurial spirit, you’ll find the chance to build, whether it’s on a large scale or a smaller one.

There had been earlier experiments. For example, vehicle detail pages in 2014, where customers could read reviews and see parts that fit their cars. And in Spain in 2019, customers were able to put down deposits on off-lease vehicles.

But three things came together more recently. Through its campaigns, the Brand Innovation Lab team discovered that customers were willing to go much farther down the car-buying journey on Amazon than on manufacturers’ own sites. This was because they trusted us.

Alongside this, the pandemic had already pushed much of car buying online. Inventory systems, financing, dealer tech—the infrastructure finally existed.

And finally, Hyundai came to us and said, “We want to co-invest with you.” That was the tipping point.

So we wrote the classic Amazon six-page proposal in late 2021 and launched an employee beta in January 2024. By December 2024, we had launched the marketplace with Hyundai dealerships selling new vehicles. As of this summer, we expanded to include more dealerships, more vehicles, and more financing options. And that’s how Amazon Autos, as you see it today, began.

Our North Star has always been to make car shopping easy and transparent for customers and to help dealers reach millions of Amazon customers already shopping on the site.

Building the initial product was a huge journey. Now it’s about scaling, both geographically and also in terms of features to help customers understand what they need—such as loans, leasing, vehicle history, trade-ins, and even dealer tools to analyze inventory and pricing.

Our road map stretches years ahead. There’s so much more we can do to support both customers and dealers.

Amazon is customer-obsessed, and the team is guided by customer behavior, feedback, and needs. These signals are vital because they help cut through opinion and shine a light on the truth. That’s why Amazon is a data-driven company.

But the magic lies in judgment—in taking many data points, distilling them to the important ones, and making sound strategic recommendations.

Sometimes the data is as simple as saying, “This is a huge locale, and we can help customers in new ways, so let’s invest.” That’s enough to set the direction.

From there, it’s about being “stubborn on the vision, flexible on the tactics,” as Jeff Bezos says.

I think success at Amazon comes down to agency—in other words, ownership, one of our Leadership Principles.

People often limit themselves, thinking they have less ability to change their environments than they really do. At Amazon, if you bring ideas, logic, and customer obsession, people will listen. If the reasoning makes sense, you have the opportunity to make your vision a reality.

That sense of empowerment is what keeps people here. It’s the flywheel of satisfaction. When people propose changes to their roles, their businesses, and those changes happen, they get a great jolt of positive feedback. And then it happens again and again.

It's a very positive working life.