Refining Amazon’s Search Engine | Dwayne Bowman and Ruben Ortega

Invent like an Owner with Dave Schappell

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3y ago 42:27

MP3•Thuis aflevering

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Dwayne Bowman and Ruben Ortega. They discuss the birth of Bowtega Box, maintaining the balance between adding new features and continuous upscaling and customer support, and redesigning and refining Amazon's Search functionality.

Ruben is the former director of Amazon's Mechanical Turk and CTO of A9.com (Amazon’s innovative search subsidiary), and was responsible for its early scaling and technical success. He also participated in designing infrastructure that could dynamically scale from hundreds to thousands of transactions per second. Dwayne, a former software engineer at Apple, was Amazon’s former Director of Engineering and took part in redesigning Amazon's Search engine.

Episode Resources:

Dwayne Bowman’s LinkedIn
Visit Woodlawn School
Ruben Ortega’s LinkedIn
Check out Tonal
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Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter

What to Listen For:

00:00 Intro
01:40 How Amazon’s Bowtega Box came to be
06:52 Making it easier for customers to navigate such as browse tree for relevant searches
08:13 Why was the alphabetical algorithm the only option in 1996-1997?
09:47 Sales jumped significantly when Bowtega Box was launched
11:21 Fixing Amazon’s Search feature for better user experience
15:23 Building a catalog for a new book consumed a lot of time
17:53 Balancing new features versus scaling and support
19:08 Preventing downtime while Search updates are ongoing
22:03 Hire people who take the problem and solve it
24:08 Without A/B Testing, take the right signal for the next step
25:45 Where did the Bowtega name originate?
26:44 What was Amazon like in 1997 - 1998?
28:10 The Bar Raiser team
30:48 Amazon’s Search team set the bar for hiring engineers
32:06 How did the product mix change search complexity?
34:22 Amazon’s first word-based ad product
36:18 Expanding the accessibility of Search in e-commerce

15 afleveringen

#Careers #Entrepreneur #Business #Dave Schappell #Amazon #History #Innovation #Inventions