Tenets: Guiding Principles for High-Impact Team Alignment

At Amazon, tenets are a vital tool for helping teams to remain focused on the most important principles and values that drive their work and inform their decisions. Tenets provide common ground that enables teams to move quickly as they scale and deliver on Amazon’s promise to build Earth’s most customer-centric company.

Why are tenets important?

Every team at Amazon creates tenets. We use tenets to align teams and make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. By setting tenets in an organization or team, team members are empowered to make decisions more independently, driving decision making down to the front line where possible.

Other companies try to write lots of policies and lots of playbooks; those just don’t work here. We expect our employees to make high-judgment decisions every day, and tenets are key to giving them the guardrails and guidance to assist without trying to codify every possible decision tree.

What are tenets?

A tenet is a principle or belief. Many teams at Amazon have crafted tenets and are guided by them. Tenets appear at the beginning of narratives (e.g., six-pagers), in roadmaps, and in other documents, to help ensure that the plan put forth by a team is consistent with its beliefs. They’re a way to grab the reader’s attention and should communicate how your team approaches problems and deals with conflicting priorities.

Why write tenets?

Tenets get everyone in agreement about critical questions that can’t be verified factually. For example, is it better to be customer obsessed or competitor obsessed? It’s hard to gather data and prove that one is better than the other. But a high-level tenet stating that Amazon should be customer obsessed in all that we do helps us work together without rehashing a nuanced debate for every product. Having tenets at many levels (org, team, project) can be used to align with the values specific to that org, team, or project.

Tenets keep you honest with yourself. It’s easy to get caught up in groupthink or to be distracted by the nuances of a specific project and lose sight of the overall goals. Stepping back and referring to the tenets helps you keep track of the broader strategy.

For me, tenets are the compass. They should allow any person or organization to be able to quickly identify which path to take, should issues arise. We are very intentional with our tenets as to what tenet is number one. As a team, we periodically review those to make sure that they’re still relevant.

Tenets for tenets

1. Use tenets to focus your team on delivering value to the customer.
2. Tenets are principles and core values that the team uses to fulfill its charter.
3. Memorable tenets challenge the reader and are concise.
4. Good tenets get people excited about what the team does.
5. Tenets help individuals make hard choices and trade-offs
6. Each tenet has only one main idea.
7. A tenet is durable and strategic.
8. A tenet captures an idea that team members could apply every day.
9. Tenets capture what makes a team different, not what makes it superior.
10. Tenets are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.

Tenets aren’t written in stone.

Tenets are guidelines that influence our actions and decisions, but they aren’t rigid, inflexible rules. Like Amazon’s Leadership Principles, they’re meant to evolve. The catchphrase “Unless you know better ones,” which is implied in virtually all tenets. Teams are encouraged to improve their tenets, perfecting them over time. 

My team's tenets (Unless you know better ones)

1. We believe in identifying the right customer problems before solving them in the right way.
2. We choose end-to-end user experiences over designing a point solution. 
3. We design a product feature only when it can be traced back to a user's insight. 
4. We prioritize end-user needs over short term business benefits. 
5. We believe that a great User Experience requires ownership from all product team members. 
6. We prioritize an industry-specific user experience over AWS design consistency. 
7. We focus on design impact and are flexible with design methods and tools. 

Hope you find them useful. What are some of the tenets your team uses? I would love to know.

Abhijit Thosar