Stephen Brozovich

During his 24 year career at Amazon, Stephen lived through many of the large scale transformations that have defined the leadership and organizational challenges of our era: from monolith to microservices, from waterfall to agile, from centralized resources to decentralized autonomous teams, from task-based IT projects to product and customer focused development, from IT as a cost center to technology as a business driver. His background is rooted in technology - Stephen began his career with Amazon in 1999 as a web developer and spent 13 years building and leading technical teams that tackled the challenges that emerged from supporting and establishing the rapid growth and global reach of Amazon’s retail business.

But as each new wave of technology and transformation came and went, Stephen became more and more intrigued by the common element in it all – the people. In 2012 he stepped out of the world of tech to focus on what would become his new passion: culture. As the leader for the Amazon Culture Program, Stephen focused his efforts on identifying, cataloguing, and democratizing many of the cultural artifacts that help Amazon employees understand and navigate the culture. As a member of the Executive Development team he applied those cultural insights to the organizational leadership challenges created by Amazon’s rapid growth in scale and scope. And as the leader for Talent Management for AWS, Stephen came to a deep appreciation for how organizational culture is often supported or undermined through the processes we create to manage our workforce.

The last five years saw another shift, and a deeper conviction. If we are truly to be customer obsessed as a company, why would we not share some of our learnings with our customers? Why would we not seek to partner in their transformation? As a Principal Evangelist with the AWS People Experience and Technology team, Stephen has led cultural transformation conversations with thousands of leaders from virtually every industry around the world, gaining greater insight into the organizational challenges that come with any kind of transformation effort, and the cultural issues that hinder and enhance an organization’s ability to invent and adapt to an ever-changing world.

Amazon’s recipe for innovation isn’t perfect, and it may not apply to all areas, but Stephen has a deep belief that the ideas that have driven Amazon’s success can have a positive impact on any organization. As a member of the Enterprise Strategy team Stephen’s focus remains on organizational culture, sharing some of the lessons learned through Amazon’s journey, with a specific focus on the people and the processes that are a necessary ingredient for any significant transformation effort.

Outside of work Stephen’s main focus is his family, his church, music, and woodworking. He designs and builds electric bass guitars and has made a recent foray into furniture design and construction. A classically trained vocalist, Stephen also performs classical choral music with Seattle’s Opus 7 Vocal Ensemble. Stephen and his family live in Kent, Washington.