The Memo - chrislaing.net
In 2002, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos issued a memo that has entered tech industry canon. The memo, known as the “API Mandate”, is generally perceived as being a statement about technology at Amazon, and is therefore widely admired by technologists and wholly ignored by executives. This is unfortunate, because it’s no exaggeration to say that the API Mandate completely transformed Amazon as a business and laid the foundation for its success. Better still, unlike many things that global technology titans do, it is something that can be replicated and put to use by almost any business.
In this post, we’ll talk about the memo, and how it created the systems and incentives for radical organisational transformation.
To understand what this means, let’s take an example. Suppose you are hired by Amazon to start selling home improvement products to the Australian market. There are a bunch of things you’re going to do to get started, like getting some new product categories set up in the database, putting listings on the Amazon website, figuring out which products to stock and how many, and getting Amazon warehouses to store those products2.
At Amazon, each of these atomic functions is a series of API calls. An API - an Application Programming Interface - is a piece of software that allows other software to talk to it and access its functionality. APIs are found everywhere in all kinds of technologies, and this is what Bezos is referring to when he refers to “service interfaces”.
