What is the name of Amazon's leadership principle that prioritizes customer needs?

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Amazon’s leadership principle that prioritizes customer needs is Customer Obsession. The principle tells leaders to start with the customer, work backward, and vigorously earn and keep customer trust.

Customer Obsession is one of Amazon’s Leadership Principles, the guidelines the company uses in daily decisions, project discussions, and hiring interviews. Amazon distinguishes it from simply watching competitors: leaders may track rivals and market trends, but the customer remains the central reference point for product choices and service improvements.

The idea reflects Amazon’s long-running customer-centric culture and its stated ambition to be Earth’s most customer-centric company. It is also closely associated with founder Jeff Bezos’s “work backwards” approach, in which teams begin by defining the customer experience before designing the technology or operations behind it.

The distractors are genuine Amazon principles, but they describe different priorities. Ownership concerns responsibility, Invent and Simplify concerns creating simpler solutions, and Deliver Results concerns execution and outcomes.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Sept. 2026

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