Mechanisms, Not Miracles: How Amazon Builds Teams That Don’t Need Babysitting

“Decisions are made by those who show up. But delivery happens because someone wrote a mechanism for it.”— If President Bartlet had run an SRE team

So yeah, this is not a free post. Here’s my rule: when I’m writing to engage my readers and followers, it’s free. When I share the knowledge I’ve accrued over the last 25 years, my time needs support. You have two options: you can subscribe or refer people and gain access for free. Don’t worry, I plan on going way deeper in future posts. But I wanted to have an example paid post early for subscribers to read.

If you're a software engineering manager, you've been here before:

• A project postmortem ends with “We’ll try to be more careful next time.”

• A team misses a deadline and says, “We assumed they’d tell us if priorities changed.”

• A critical bug goes live because someone forgot to run the tests. Again. Then followed by: “We’ll do a better code review next time.”

No malice. No laziness. Just good people with good intentions...and no system.

Now, imagine the opposite.

Imagine a world where:

• Launch reviews occur before the issue arises.

• Prioritization is transparent across squads.

• Your best engineers are writing code, not babysitting process gaps.

• Quality, speed, and customer obsession aren’t heroic efforts—they’re defaults.

That’s not a fantasy. That’s Amazon.
And the reason it works there has nothing to do with more brilliant engineers or better espresso.

It’s because they replaced good intentions with mechanisms.

Jeff Bezos didn’t just write principles like “customer obsession” and “bias for action"—he wired the org to behave accordingly. Want to influence a roadmap? You write a six-pager. Want to propose a feature? You start with a PR/FAQ. Want to run a team? You own metrics, ops reviews, and hiring loops that self-correct over time.

The system doesn’t need you to remember. It expects you to forget—and then catches you.

This is the part most engineering managers miss.
They believe culture will scale. It won’t.
They think values will hold. They fade.
And they assume their smartest ICs can fill in the gaps. For a while, they can. Until they leave.

The only thing that scales is a mechanism:

A repeatable, inspectable, self-reinforcing process that makes the right thing automatic and the wrong thing obvious.

1. What is a Mechanism, Technically?