Texting All Teams: Amazon Enters the Cell Phone Market
Cell phones are nothing new. But imagine if you got to help develop the new phone from Amazon. Would it slide open to have double touch screens so you can do two things at once? Would it allow you to video call several of your friends at once? Would you be able to use your phone as a USB drive and let it attach to computers or projectors for presentations? Or would you design it to fit the business niche, with advanced teleconferencing abilities so that you could deliver a presentation and run a meeting all through your phone from anywhere?
Amazon's new smartphone called the Fire Phone. It includes sensors that allow phone users to operate the phone and play games without having to touch the screen. The phone also has infrared cameras that allow images to move with the user and show images in 3-D.
Development of the Fire Phone began in 2009 and was hindered by technical and organizational challenges. Employees were tasked with the mission of creating a phone that would be different and better for Amazon's most engaged customers. To do so, teams were created and put in charge of finding the right cameras, how to stabilize the 3-D effect, how to use camera tracking for scrolling and interacting with the menus, how to enhance the integration with the Amazon App Store and Prime, and how to make customers aware of the new features. Leadership on the project changed several times, with CEO Jeff Bezos even stepping in to lead the project. The teams themselves had to deal with conflicts among one another, balancing the desires of management, the drive to make something cool, and the budgetary and technological requirements.
Discussion Questions
1. In designing the Fire Phone, Amazon employees were tasked with being very creative. What do you think the different feature teams did to come up with creative ideas for the phone? How do you think Amazon evaluated the team's success?
2. With such a creative team, it's likely you'll come up with a number of ideas. How would the team decide what would be the best features to include? What factors do you think will be the biggest in making the decision? When should you call in a leader or supervisor?
3. How could leadership changes hinder the team's relationships and effectiveness? Which do you think would have the most impact: the leader's attitude, the leader's personality, or the leader's style?
4. You've come up with what you think is a great idea for the phone, and your teammates, who you have developed a very good relationship with, like it as well. How can you be sure that it is a good idea and not a by-product of the groupthink effect?