Promotions, Mechanisms, and Managers: What Amazon Got Right — and What Broke

If It's Sunday, It's Meet the Press, Church, Colts, and Promotion Docs

Today, I have to attend church for Sunday Mass and communion. I reconnected with an old family friend who is also an Anglican reverend. It might be part guilt, part curiosity, part not wanting to go to hell, but yes, I’m going to Church. I might take the time in a future post to reflect on being steeped in both a Hindu and Anglican/Presbyterian/Baptist tradition.

However, before doing that, it led me to the sensitive topic of promotions… While I’m sure my former Amazon colleagues will be interested in this post, it is actually crucial for anyone implementing a mechanism in’ a mechanism in a Fortune 500 company or a startup.

This is another example of how mechanisms can improve an organization, yet have unintended consequences.

1. Mechanisms Are How Culture Replicates

Amazon doesn't run on vibes. It runs on mechanisms.

Promotions, like COEs, PR/FAQs, six-pagers, and ops reviews, aren’t just operational necessities. They are cultural replication protocols — encoding the company's values into structured decisions that scale.

Biological Analogy: DNA Replication

In biology, DNA replication ensures that each new cell inherits the same genetic blueprint. One miscopied nucleotide can introduce a mutation; unchecked, this can break entire systems.

Promotions work the same way. They say, "This is what success looks like. Copy that."

When the bar slips, it isn't just a bad decision — it's a mutation in the organizational genome.

Religious Analogy: The Apostolic Tradition

(I don't make this analogy with the Catholic or Anglican Church lightly. These are institutions I respect deeply. But it’s also important to acknowledge that while mechanisms help scale a culture or religion, they also carry unintended side effects. Mechanisms can create bureaucracy, enable bloat, and even facilitate abuse—sometimes jaw-dropping abuse-all of which I observed, and continue to observe, at Amazon… and I hate to say it, some churches.)

Consider the Catholic and Anglican Churches. These institutions have preserved identity across continents and centuries, not through charisma, but through mechanisms:

• Baptism: Mechanism of entry.

• Confirmation: Mechanism of maturity.

• Communion: Mechanism of sustained belonging.

• Excommunication: Mechanism of identity protection.

All of these are in service of replicating what theologians call the apostolic tradition.

"And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others."
— 2 Timothy 2:2

That’s four generations of cultural DNA replication in a single verse.

Promotions at Amazon serve a similar function. They aren’t just rewards. They're the company saying:

"This person carries our cultural DNA. Follow them."

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2. The Original System: Brutal, but Faithful

In old-school Amazon, getting promoted — especially to senior levels — meant facing a panel. Sometimes multiple panels. Any dissent could tank the case.

What It Got Right:

• High fidelity: Promotions reflected consistent application of standards across teams. A Level 6 engineer in Seattle meant the same thing as a Level 6 in Hyderabad.

• Signal clarity: When someone was promoted, it sent a strong message that they were truly operating at the next level. This created trust in the system and cohesion across the org.

• Bias for rigor: Because every panel required unanimity or near-unanimity, there was no room for casual elevation. Each case had to be deeply defensible.

What It Got Wrong: