25 years of product innovation at Amazon: Brian shares his career learnings

Meet Brian Saltzman, Sr Principal Technical Product Manager at Amazon Ads. With over 25 years’ tenure , Brian offers his perspective on the company's evolution, the challenges of scaling, and opportunities in advertising.

It's been an incredible ride. I started when Amazon had less than 1,000 employees, which puts things in perspective considering how many it now has all over the world. I've seen Amazon transform from a company with a single product line of books and one fulfillment center in Seattle to a company with a store that sells virtually everything, a thriving third-party merchant business, and several other successful businesses, such as AWS and Amazon Ads.

One of the most significant shifts I was part of was the transition to mobile. We recognized early on that mobile shopping would be huge, and we wanted to get ahead of it. This experience taught us valuable lessons about scaling teams and allowing multiple teams to contribute their expertise and code to build an overall experience. We’ve since applied this pattern in many places—including Ads.

I started in an entry-level role in customer service operations. Amazon was growing so quickly and digital shopping was so new that we couldn't hire experts in all the different areas we wanted to grow as a business. This afforded me a lot of opportunities to stretch myself, try new things, and have an impact on the company.

My academic background was actually in British literature; I joined Amazon after my doctoral exams. However, I had been writing computer programs since elementary school and had experience with early internet technologies. This blend of humanities and tech proved valuable as I quickly realized my passion was for building great software products for users.

I initially focused on tools for customer service and fraud operations before moving into consumer-facing products. Along the way, I was fortunate to have people take chances on me and invest in my growth, allowing me to advance in my career.

In many ways, Amazon's core approach to innovation and product development hasn't changed, as there has always been a strong focus on the customer since the beginning. However, as Amazon has grown in scale, we’ve had to evolve both our technology and processes to meet the needs of a wider range of customers.

One significant change was moving from a single-binary website to a multi-tier, service-oriented architecture. This shift enabled Amazon's current model of single-threaded ownership and autonomy, where teams can work independently and use APIs to reuse capabilities rather than collaborate on every aspect.

Despite technological changes, Amazon still relies heavily on its working backwards process—a method that employees have used for more than 20 years to identify customer needs and deliver effectively. While some tools and mechanisms have changed, the underlying spirit of how Amazon builds products remains consistent.

The key is to recognize the shift early and invest accordingly. For generative AI, we feel it's going to be a part of everything that every team does. So while we have some folks who are specialists in this area, a big part of my role is to ensure that each team at Amazon Ads is developing capabilities.

We're fortunate that everyone recognizes AI's importance, unlike previous shifts where people questioned the technology's potential in the early days (like mobile shopping). The challenge now is to integrate it effectively while maintaining our customer obsession and adhering to regulatory requirements.

Navigating an organization like Amazon as a product manager requires a blend of customer focus, strategic thinking, and adaptability. Here's my advice:

• Always work backwards from the customer. This isn't just a catchphrase; it's a fundamental principle. Start with identifying your customer’s needs, then figure out how to build a sustainable business around meeting them.
• Establish clear success metrics for your products. In a large organization, it's easy to get caught up in activities that don't drive meaningful outcomes. Define measurable goals that tie directly to customer value and business impact.
• Don't let disagreements linger. If an issue can't be resolved quickly, escalate it. This helps establish guardrails for decision-making and prevents long-term bottlenecks, which is crucial in a fast-paced environment.
• Embrace an “always be shipping” mentality. Get your products or features into customers' hands quickly, learn from real-world usage, and iterate rapidly. This approach allows you to validate assumptions and make improvements based on actual customer behavior.
• Be open to stretching yourself and learning new skills, even if they seem unrelated to your current role. This adaptability can lead to innovative solutions and career growth. Similarly, don't shy away from seemingly unnatural extensions of your business, as some of Amazon's most successful ventures started this way.
• As you scale, be prepared to adapt your processes and technologies, but always stay true to your core principles. In the current age of AI and rapidly evolving technology, focus on finding the right balance between personalization and discovery for both customers and brands.

What makes Amazon Ads unique is that advertising is a very complex and interesting industry. Even after spending close to 10 years in this space, I'm still learning something every day. From a business and customer perspective, there's a fantastic opportunity here to connect customers with products and brands they love.

The potential of creative AI is incredibly exciting. It's a special time in our industry, and we have the opportunity to drive significant innovation.

What's also exciting is that in this age of generative AI, we now also have tools to help marketers reach customers at a scale that's never been done before. This allows both the largest brands in the world to continue connecting with customers who know and love them and smaller brands to tell their stories and reach customers anywhere they are. If you think about 20 to 30 years ago, a small local company focusing on a niche product would have had a hard time reaching a national audience, much less an international one. Now Amazon really gives them a way to reach all those customers and to tell their stories while doing it.