Amazon Prime Air drone delivery meetings get tense amid delays, new leaders

• Amazon’s Prime Air team continues to struggle with increasing difficulties as longtime employees battle new hires.
• To All Hands in March, some employees expressed frustration with newly hired Boeing executives.
• Executives also had to answer questions about the lack of transparency, high turnover and launch delays.

Amazon’s Prime Air drone delivery team continues to experience growing pains as internal strife, high revenue and launch delays threaten one of Amazon’s most ambitious plans to deliver packages via unmanned aerial vehicles.

These tensions came to a head during a bare-handed meeting in March, during which Prime Air management had to answer questions submitted and voted on by employees. These questions have focused on those contentious issues, including those between longtime employees and new hires in the aerospace industry, which the former accuse of moving too slowly. They also spoke about the division’s high turnover rate, which was 20% in 2020, Insider has learned.

The question that received the most upvotes highlighted a cultural conflict between the new leaders and the existing structure of the company, according to a transcript of the meeting obtained by Insider.

“One peer noted that over the past year, all four people in his chain of management have been replaced by expatriates from Boeing,” the survey said, referring to the multiple executives who joined Amazon from from Boeing last year. “What are we doing to preserve Amazon’s unique culture and principles within Prime Air while growing our organization with established industry leaders? “

David Carbon, vice president of Prime Air and a former Boeing executive who replaced the team’s founding vice president Gur Kimchi in 2020, said the use of the word “expats” was “ridiculous,” the comparing it to a refusal to hire people from Microsoft when you need software experts.

“Software expertise comes from companies like this. Likewise, aerospace expertise comes from companies like Boeing,” Carbon said, according to the transcript. “In Jeff’s words, we’re an aerospace organization that needs to be imbued with aerospace methods and practices in order to keep our products safe. The secret is to merge that with what’s great about Amazon.”

Carbon added, “I don’t apologize for the hiring we’re doing, and I don’t apologize for bringing Prime Air closer to Amazon.”

The exchange is the latest sign of trouble at Prime Air, Amazon’s most ambitious shipping program, which hopes to deliver packages to customers’ doors using fully electric drones. First disclosed in 2013, Prime Air has struggled to meet its own high expectations, in part due to a lack of focus, years of internal conflict and regulatory hurdles, Insider previously reported. These tensions and those discussed at the March meeting persist, several employees told Insider.

The team has also faced repeated launch delays and now aims to have a smooth launch in the third quarter of 2022, according to people familiar with the matter.

Cultural differences between longtime Amazon employees and new hires within Prime Air is also an issue that is becoming increasingly problematic across the company as Amazon continues to grow and develop. attracting new people from large, mature companies – a worrying trend that employees previously told Insider. is expected to worsen amid the biggest leadership upheaval in company history.

In an email to Insider, the Amazon spokesperson said that Prime Air’s attrition rate has improved in recent months.

“Prime Air has new leadership and it is only fitting that some team members find new roles as the program moves from R&D to a focus on operations, ”the spokesperson said.

Amazon Prime Air

20% of turnover

The tension between local Amazon talent and new aviation hires – at least four of the top executives have been replaced with Boeing executives – in Prime Air has been a constant source of conflict, according to several current and former employees. who spoke with Insider.

Most Amazon engineers prefer an “agile” approach to software development, which allows for more flexibility and iteration throughout the process when they find bugs in the system. But aircraft development has traditionally involved a more structured and regulated process, commonly referred to as a “waterfall” approach, the people said.

This difference created multiple setbacks in the design and regulatory approval of Prime Air’s drones, which led to frequent schedule adjustments, they said. Indeed, during the March meeting, several employees questioned the launch delays. One employee said many decisions “burn bridges everywhere” and affect the “team’s ability to meet existing schedules.”

Another question called for “clearer leadership on the technical side of the program,” while an employee asked what would happen if the team failed to meet its launch deadline again, set internally for the third quarter of 2022.

“Let’s say the worst-case scenario and we fail to hit our alpha launch by Q3 2022. What happens then? Push the goal post another two years?” the employee asked.

The management team did not respond directly to most of these questions, the employees said. But one issue Carbon spent a lot of time discussing was about Prime Air’s high turnover. He said Prime Air’s attrition in 2020 was 20%, a high number even compared to other parts of Amazon. The Amazon Robotics team saw a 16% attrition rate last year, while the larger operational organization saw 14% revenue, Carbon said.

People who left in 2020 didn’t want to wait another two years to launch Prime Air or didn’t agree with the team’s long-term plans, Carbon said at the meeting, adding that he was studying recruitment and attrition data. three times per week.

“The good news is we’ve made steady progress despite attrition,” Carbon said. “We can’t keep 20% – it’s just going to kill our people.”

The Prime Air team’s turnover rate has now fallen to 16%, according to people familiar with the matter.

It is not known where the development process for Prime Air is. An internal timeline seen by Insider last year showed that its first official test delivery was due in August 2020. This month, Amazon also received Federal Aviation Administration clearance to use autonomous drones in a commercial transaction.

Many Prime Air employees also appear to be in the dark about the team’s overall progress. An employee said there was “significant confusion” between engineering teams and business units as to what the future product would look like, adding that “this ambiguity adds enormous risk” to the development of its drone vehicles. . Others called for more regular learning sessions within the team so that they could “learn what other teams are working on” and why the team had recently reduced its presence in the UK and Paris.

“I have no idea what we have accomplished as an organization in 2020 to bring us closer to delivery to actual customers,” another employee wrote in a question.

Do you work at Amazon? Contact reporter Eugene Kim through the Signal and Telegram encrypted messaging apps (+ 1-650-942-3061) or email ([email protected]).