CXBR: The Other Amazon Bar Raiser

It’s been a decade (!) since I started at Amazon as a PM in the Kindle org, but I remember it like it was yesterday. Having just gone through their (in)famous hiring process, I was ready to hit the ground running on Day 1*. After being rejected once, years earlier, by a bar raiser, I’d prepared intensely and made it through. The myth of the bar raiser (I’ll detail my encounter in a future post) has reached a point where there are forums and articles littered with advice on navigating the experience.

But there is another bar raiser program at Amazon that is rarely talked about, which comes into play once you’re an employee: the Customer Experience Bar Raiser (CXBR).

My first week at Amazon started with a 1/2 day of new hire orientation, followed by a quick lunch with my manager, and then I was immediately thrown into the deep end. There was a new device (retroactively named the Kindle Keyboard) in the works, which was anticipated to the be the “Toyota Camry” of e-readers (i.e. everyone …