How to Think Like Amazon to Disrupt and Innovate

Sometimes, there is nothing worse than having to get dressed and leave the house.

I have a two-year-old so getting him ready and out of the house, just so I can buy raisins and a toothbrush, it feels like a marathon of an effort. Maybe when he’s three he can do the shopping for me.

Amazon knew we felt this way, so years ago their first solution was Prime Pantry: a grocery delivery system for Amazon Prime customers, but just for non-perishable goods.

They use a dynamic algorithm to calculate the minimum size and number of boxes you need for your order. There’s a fixed fee of about $6 a box.

This set up helps you, the customer, manage costs. And for them, it’s a highly efficient way for pickers, which is what the Amazon warehouse workers are known as, to fill your order. In some cities, Prime Pantry arrives on the same day. It’s normally 1 to 2 days in other places.

Amazon Innovation: Be Completely Customer-Centric

Amazon isn’t the only store to do this but they are always looking for new ways to innovate and work out exactly what people are looking for. Their aim is to be completely customer-centric, where the pain points of the customers start the cycle of innovation.

They saw that people weren’t happy with how they got their groceries, so they looked at how to fix it. The best evidence of this is that they didn’t stop at Prime Pantry.

After their acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, Prime customers can now get that wholesome goodness delivered too. It’s only rolled out in 4 markets so far but it’s sure to expand further. This is going to allow them to deliver a far wider range of products.

And they kept looking at the whole grocery shopping process, to address the needs of every kind of customer and gained a deep understanding at each step of the consumer process.

That’s what led to Amazon Go; a grocery store with no checkouts. At first, it seems like a complete contradiction; you start delivering to people’s homes because they don’t want to go to the store. And then you open a store that sells mostly the same goods people were buying online; it seems ridiculous, doesn’t it? It’s like expanding your BBQ joint by adding a vegan falafel stand.

But Amazon realized that there were many different reasons why people didn’t like going to a store, just as there are many reasons why people don’t like waiting around for a delivery.

Sometimes, we feel lazy, and we can’t be bothered to leave home and carry our groceries back. Other times, we’d prefer to look around a store and get our groceries now, but we just don’t want to deal with people. Idle chit-chat at the counter and queuing up, this really bothers some folks. A traditional grocery store was a problem for both groups, a purchasing process they didn’t enjoy, but the reasons were very different.

Amazon manages to innovate like this because they look at every step a customer needs to take in order to get the products in their hands.

For grocery delivery, this would be things like logging into the website, searching for a product, clicking to purchase, opening the door for a delivery; all of these small tasks (with many smaller subtasks as well) make up the purchasing experience. Customer A might be fine with everything except task 8. Customer B might hate tasks 3 and 11. You get the idea.

For me, it really bugs me when one of the grocery items is unavailable and replaced with what the shopper thinks is similar. Say I order spinach and they put in arugula. If I’m making a salad, okay, no problem. But I want spinach for my smoothie. No one wants to drink an arugula smoothie, that is a scientific fact.

This “innovation around tasks” can be taken by anyone providing a product or service. Whether that’s helping customers, improving your department or anything that makes your job better.

How You Can Innovate Like Amazon

Let's look at how you can adopt an approach to innovation and apply it to almost anything. Whether you run a company, want to make your own job easier, or to tackle a personal project; innovation is for everyone and everything.

Because innovation is really just problem-solving; what do we do now and how can we make that easier?

Too often, we look from very far away, like the customer needs some cereal, so they buy some cereal. They eat cereal, yum yum yum.

But the process of buying cereal is a job filled with tasks that a customer has to do, and it involves many steps. When you break down the whole job, from start to finish, it’s so much easier to see where you can innovate because often the steps are completely different activities so they need completely different solutions.

So, let’s do a quick list of the steps in grocery shopping:

1. Make a list of what you need, mental or written
2. Get to the store
3. Try to find the items you want
4. Queue up to pay
5. Pay
6. Take your groceries home
7. Unpack the groceries

That’s 7 steps already but it’s just a start and you could break each of those down much further.

Getting to the store involves many steps and your needs will be totally different if you are hopping on a metro in a city, or driving through the countryside.

Finding your items seems simple but what about comparing similar products, checking out in-store promotions or coupons. You could create an app or a new system for every one of these steps within steps.

Start Innovating Today

So, you can totally apply this to your customers or your department or your own personal projects - whatever you want.

Take a good look at the whole job being performed and break it down carefully into all of the steps it takes. Then, step back and you’ll see which steps are causing the most problems. Your innovation could be just a matter of fixing those one or two steps.

Give it a try.

Think about some small job you don’t enjoy and see if you can really isolate that one step in the job that bugs you. Hopefully, that will let you see how to fix it - let us know how it works out in the comments below.

Karen Holst from Start Within focuses on the newest technology and innovation companies are launching. We then go into some of the mindsets, tips, and solutions these companies employ to enable you to go out and launch new things, right where you are.