Amazon Confidential

This case and the numbers published in this case are not representative of any Amazon businesses within India or in
any other region where Amazon has offices or operations and should not be used for any public or media
consumption.



Product Management Case Study 1
As Siva, Head of Product Management at Amazon, sipped on his morning coffee and prepared
for a meeting with Product Managers later in the day, an article in The Economic Times caught
his attention. The article, Paving the Last Mile, explored the innovations in last mile delivery
logistics implemented by leading e-commerce companies. For the last few years, Amazon has
been innovating on behalf of customers to provide fast, reliable and cheap delivery options.
Delivering products on time and in the first attempt, translates into excellent customer
experience and at the same time, it streamlines the cost of operations for Amazon.
A month ago, Sivas Team had introduced a new feature called Delivery Preferences that
enabled customers to specify what should be done in case they are not available at the time of
delivery by the courier service. The preferences included options
1
such as Leave with
Neighbour, Leave at Doorstep etc.
Siva and his Team are scheduled to meet this afternoon. As a Product Manager, you have quite
a bit of homework to do. You know that there will be a lot of questions to determine the impact
of this feature.
Please refer to the Data
2
in Appendix 1 and answer the following questions.
Deliverables
3
:
1. Looking at the data, and with the understanding of the Delivery Preferences workflow,
what business questions do you expect Siva to ask? List the top 5 questions. (1 page)
2. How will you evaluate the performance of this feature? List 5 metrics that you will track
along with a brief explanation. (1 page)
3. At the end of the meeting, you know the inevitable question that always comes up, How
can we make it better? Suggest 3 ways to improve this feature, and estimate the impact
4

of these improvements based on past data. (2 pages)




1
For a complete list of options, visit amazon.co.uk and follow the checkout process till the Select a
Delivery Address page.
2
None of the numbers used in this case are real. The data has been generated for use in this case only.
3
One single PDF + Your workings in an excel file. Font Style: Times New Roman / Line Spacing: 1.5 / Font
Size: 11
4
Show your analysis / data points/ tables in the Appendix at end of the document. Appendix is not part of
page limits.
Amazon Confidential
This case and the numbers published in this case are not representative of any Amazon businesses within India or in
any other region where Amazon has offices or operations and should not be used for any public or media
consumption.



Appendix 1:
DataSet1
Shipment ID, $Value, Ship Date, First Attempt Date (Null if not attempted), Actual Delivery Date
(Null if not delivered), Delivery Preference Choice (Porch, Neighbour, Garage, Shed, Null
5
)
DataSet2
Contact Date, Contact ID, Agent Name, Shipment ID, Contact Reason, Contact Method
Dataset3
Shipment ID, Concession Date, Concession Reason
Estimates:
1. Cost of servicing one customer contacting us once is 2$
2. Cost of one attempt per shipment is 25$
3. Concessions are given = $value when a shipment is damaged, lost or delayed
Leadership Principles
6
:


http://www.amazon.jobs/principles

5
If a customer doesnt specify any option, the value would be Null
6
Amazonians align their solutions using Leadership Principles as guidelines.