AWS executive Sarah Cooper has launched several companies and held roles at NASA and AWS, but she’s only ever formally interviewed for three jobs.
Instead, Cooper told Business Insider that her career moves often begin with writing a proposal about the work she wants to pursue, either to a VC, a cofounder, or an executive leader, and that becomes the role she steps into.
“I have a million ideas,” Cooper said. “It’s a blessing and a curse.”
Cooper has seen a high rate of success with her proposals. She used them to invent both her previous and current roles at AWS.
Cooper was previously the head of AWS Industry Products, where she worked closely with customers to develop industry solutions in the cloud. Now she leads the “AWS AI-Native” team, an AWS product organization that works with customers to understand how companies will evolve with AI.
Cooper said she wrote a proposal to pitch her last two roles, and she’s a fan of the six-page memo, a favorite of Jeff Bezos. Instead of PowerPoint decks, Bezos often opted to start meetings by having attendees read a 6-page “narratively structured” memo silently at the start of the meeting. The founder has said he prefers memos to avoid “hiding a lot of sloppy thinking in bullet points.”
These six-page memos typically describe detailed plans for a new initiative and are written using 10-point font. Bezos wrote years ago in an annual shareholder letter that “great memos are written and re-written,” and can’t be done in a couple of days, though the exact criteria remains more flexible.
Cooper also referenced using Amazon’s classic PR/FAQ framework. The executive said she finds the format “effective at helping people quickly understand what your idea is and why it matters.”
Amazon describes the framework as a means to develop ideas and initiatives that enable teams to quickly integrate feedback and promote fact-based decision-making. The press-release portion spans a few paragraphs and provides the reader with highlights of the customer experience. The FAQ section, typically five pages or less, dives into the details and also outlines the challenges of building the product or service.
Once a draft is written, the creator typically schedules a one-hour meeting with stakeholders to review the document and get feedback, the company said in a blog post about the framework.
Cooper said she’s written over 14 PR/FAQs and investment narratives that have been funded, as well as many other ideas that the company didn’t move forward with.
Cooper, who has been at Amazon for over nine years, says she also tries to reflect the organization’s values when writing proposals. Amazon’s PR/FAQ format originated from a process the company calls “Working Backwards,” a method for evaluating new ideas by first defining the ideal customer experience and then reverse-engineering what the team needs to build to achieve it.
Cooper said Amazon is “customer-obsessed,” so she tries to focus on that value when drafting a memo. She said she thinks less about the needs of a specific team and more broadly about customers and the best way to serve them, regardless of what’s been done previously.
While Cooper has spent her career writing proposals, many never see the light of day — and those that do don’t always go smoothly, she said. In her late 20s, while serving as the CTO of a company, she wrote a proposal suggesting that the business should focus limited resources on scaling the supply chain, specifically with the supply chain involved in on-mine extraction to meet demand for contracts. The company disagreed on where to invest.
“I got pushed out of one of my companies, basically, for a proposal I wrote,” Cooper said.
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