Think Like Amazon
Learn how to apply Amazon’s core principles and innovation frameworks to elevate your business and career. Join Jorge Luis Pando, an 8-year Amazon veteran who’s helped over 70,000 Amazonians boost productivity, as he dives into real-world insights from leaders who’ve transformed their work using Amazon-inspired methods like customer obsession and systems thinking. With global experience in product, tech, and marketing, Jorge brings a fresh perspective to every conversation.
Whether you lead a startup, growing business, or team outside of tech, each episode delivers practical tools to innovate, scale, and lead with confidence. Follow us on LinkedIn for updates: https://www.linkedin.com/company/think-like-amazon-podcast/
Think Like Amazon
Customer Obsession in action with Kim Mathisen
Kim spent 12 years at Amazon where she managed various retail functions across Books, Grocery, Outdoors, and Tools categories, ultimately serving as director and category leader over a multi-billion-dollar business. Over the years, Kim relied on a customer-first approach to quickly navigate new role transitions and grow successful category businesses. Kim now exercises her customer obsession as Chief Customer Officer at Microsoft where she has leveraged many of the practices picked up at Amazon to help her teams delight enterprise customers.
Listen in to hear Kim share her experience with this core Amazon leadership principle and speak to the ways Amazon leaders use customer obsession to shape weekly business deep dives, team strategy sessions, partnerships with sellers and vendors, and mechanisms to empower frontline workers. You’ll likely come away with some new ideas to try and a renewed sense for how leaders can create value for customers through their work.
Mentioned in the podcast:
Microsoft Dynamics: http://www.dynamics.com
Kim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-mathisen/
More from the episode:
3:38 – How to use a customer focus to quickly learn a new business
9:12 – Amazon’s internal practices to keep focus on the customer
16:08 – How Amazon leaders view sellers as customers
22:00 – What the difference looks like between just wanting to help customers and really obsessing over customers
27:20 – What sugar-free gummy bears can illustrate about Amazon’s customer obsession and order volume
28:40 – How Kim has applied Customer Obsession in her subsequent work at Microsoft
32:40 – Tips for building a stronger customer-centered culture in any business