Q&A with Yan Weng, Director of Software Development for Delivery Experience
Everyone, meet Yan Weng ! Yan has been an Amazonian for over 18 years and is now the Director of Software Development on our Delivery Experience (DEX) team, which innovates and builds delivery experiences, tech, and platforms that improve the lives of our customers by letting them choose when, where, and how they want their orders.
Yan, can you share your Amazon story with us? How have you navigated changes and challenges within Amazon during your 18-year tenure here?
When I first stepped into Amazon as a tech lead 18 years ago, I was curious to learn how Amazon achieved “internet scale” from an engineering perspective. I had no idea the incredible journey I was embarking on at the time. The trick has always been to stay curious and hungry for new learning. I've jumped at the chance to work on impactful things from Prime to Alexa and Amazon Go to Delivery Experience. The selection of technical challenges have been diverse — from building multi-tenancy systems and recommendation engines to working on natural language understanding and computer vision.
I've worked in many different roles here at Amazon from product, engineering, to applied science and this has given me a wide-angle lens on things, helping me to see the big picture and connect the dots better. Change has been a constant in my career journey, and I've navigated that by doing a kind of yearly 'self-audit.' I look at what I've learned, what skills I've picked up, and then figure out what I need to change or do more of by self reflecting on a yearly basis, which helps me align my growth with Amazon's ever-changing landscape keeping me on my toes.
What brings you passion/excitement to your role and team?
The large impact that DEX has on amazon customer experience and the science and engineering challenge associated with some of the most complex problems. It’s a fun and fulfilled journey to innovate on behalf of hundreds of millions of customers!
How do you foster diversity and inclusion on your team?
In the early days of my career, one of my managers taught me a valuable lesson: "it is important to seek different perspectives before making important decisions." It's like seeing the full picture from multiple angles, which helps me avoid overlooking my own blind spots and make better choices. As I moved forward in my career, this lesson has proven itself correct time and time again.
Today, the eight members of my direct leadership team come from six different countries and have diverse experiences in various industries. During our discussions, I take the time to understand their perspective before sharing my own thoughts for an open discussion. I share my appreciation to their independent thinking and unique contributions, especially when they have different and insightful views than my own.
I know that there are different aspects to a problem, and there's typically more than one way to solve them. That's why I encourage my team to be open for exploring different approaches to improve, even if those approaches are different from what I would do myself. The open environment creates good quality ideas. Lately, I've been inspired by my team's ideas on technology direction and growing more leaders in the org.
What is your favorite Amazon leadership principle and why?
Invent and Simplify — emphasis on simplify. To succeed in this leadership principle, you must actively dive deep to comprehend complex problems and requirements. Then, you need to trace back from the true needs of customers. Sometimes, it's important to challenge the assumptions within your team to create "simple" solutions.
领英推荐
I remember when I was working on Just Walk Out by Amazon Go, we had a machine learning model that was hard to understand and caused poor customer experiences for certain situations for a long time. We decided to take a fresh look at the problem and ask tough questions about our assumptions. As a result, we developed a completely new and much simpler algorithm that resolved the longstanding issues customers faced.
I saw similar pattern happened multiple times in applied science area, including the area I am currently working on. Although we have many advanced tools in our toolbox, such as deep learning, gradient boosted trees, causal inference, and recently large language models, we frequently make practical trade-off decisions between pure science accuracy metrics and system complexity. sometimes simple things can go a long way.
Looking back on your Amazon story, what are the main lessons you learned from your experience?
Amazon taught me to embrace “impossible” challenges and have a “can do” attitude for those challenges. I once led an effort to reduce waiting time on the Amazon website. This was a new concept at the time, and there were many challenges, like browser limitations and varying network speeds. I had ideas to reduce waiting time by 15%.
I was open to the challenge of a 30% reduction, expecting to find new opportunities throughout the year. However, the goal was raised to a 50% reduction. I was nervous and doubted whether we could meet this ambitious goal.
My supervisor assured me that the leadership team understood the difficulty and saw it as an ambitious target. It was meant to encourage creative thinking and prompt us to find innovative solutions. So, I focused on collaborating with my team and partners. Surprisingly, we not only met but exceeded the goal by the end of the year.
This experience taught me an important lesson: not to dismiss something as impossible too quickly. Challenging assumptions can lead to surprising achievements. Throughout my career at Amazon, I've seen this lesson proven time and time again.
What do you do for fun/work-life balance?
When I'm not working, I dedicate most of my time to my lovely wife and two beautiful daughters. I prioritize being present in their lives and supporting my daughters' growth. To show my support and be there for them, I made a promise to learn every sport they learn. As a result, I've learned how to ski and even figure skate!
I believe it's important to proactively communicate and set expectations with my managers. For instance, when my kids were very young, I intentionally chose roles that didn't involve international travel. Even though I was interested in some technical challenges presented to me and the opportunity to lead teams in EU, I passed on them. I also didn't take on additional teams in different countries to accelerate my career growth.
I have no regrets about these decisions because I can always pursue new challenges in the future, but I can't get back the precious moments with my daughters. I still remember the joy my daughter felt when I went to her class to read "Around the World" and "The Monster at the End of the Book" to the entire class! Those moments are priceless to me.