How did Amazon create Prime Now? The 1 hour delivery service!

This article is about the creation of the Amazon Prime Now service; a technological and logistical feat". This service offers delivery of goods in one hour for an additional $7.99 delivery fee or in two hours for free, and is now available in seven countries.

Imagine the challenges to get this done. Orders need to be processed within minutes. The provider needs to prepare the package and the delivery guy needs to be there in the remaining half an hour.... And we are not talking about restaurant food. We are talking about groceries, devices, electronics, sports and outdoors goods etc.

Now, Amazon has thousands of IT microservices (graphic on the right) and hundreds of autonomous DevOps teams, who do not work in an enterprise wide cadence. Each team is responsible for several small microservices and can work without much coordination with other teams. They do not use a synchronization method, like Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), to make sure team efforts are coordinated, just because..... it is not necessary. So how do you organize a complex project like developing Prime Now, that cuts across many teams? Even if teams were working according to Scaled Agile Framework, it would still be hard to get a complex, cross release train project done. I have seen the same problem when implementing for example SEPA, PSD2 or privacy regulations in banks. The Prime Now project needed work from many DevOps teams, who obviously had a lot of other high priority work on their backlog, than some kind of one-of-many new initiatives.

As every new initiative at Amazon, this project was started with a small "two-pizza" sized team (A team with the number of people you can feed with two pizzas). This team could create a new, separate Prime Now delivery service with separate systems an processes, but this would not be scalable. They had to coordinate with the existing main service DevOps teams. To make sure work would be prioritized accordingly and that impediments would be removed, a steering committee was formed and a Technical Program Manager was assigned. The program sponsor, head of the steering committee had a direct link with top management (Jeff Bezos).

The two pizza team build a "facade" that handled and managed orders and they started the service with a limited number of products and providers in New York City, December 2014.

This is an important lesson for agile organizations. In some occasions, you still need strong project- or program management. For many projects we do not need project- ,program managers or steering committees any more, but if there is a new type of coordination needed to get things done, then it might be required.

For more information on this fascinating story, watch Tisson Mathews presentation on the DevOps Enterprice Summit : https://bit.ly/2D86rwW