Justin Maner spent 10 years at Amazon where he was involved in quickly scaling several category teams before leading the turnaround of Amazon’s Baby Registry and managing innovation-centered teams as a director for Amazon Devices. In this interview, Justin dives into the Think Big principle and illustrates how he applied it to accelerate building for the Tools marketplace, develop a novel approach to quickly scale vendor sign-ups in the Pets category, and innovate on behalf of customers as he built up the Baby Registry program.

Over the last couple years, Justin has been applying his innovative leadership to several startups and applying many of the key questions and practices that helped him Think Big at Amazon. There is something for every business leader to take away from Justin’s various examples, resources, and applications throughout the conversation.

 Find Justin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinmaner/

More from the episode:

4:13 – The 3 life stages that companies and teams evolve through

5:24 – How a high-autonomy structure can fuel big thinking for the right personalities

7:30 – “Think Big” defined

7:58 – How challenging standard thinking resulted in a 5X improvement in tradeshow vendor signups

11:54 – How asking about the extremes to challenge a team to think creatively

14:47 – Two book recommendations to help anyone learn to be more innovative

15:36 – The 3-option approach to empower teams to think bigger

17:15 – Three company cultures of innovation and the tradeoffs of each

22:03 – Placing multiple bets and assessing each for traction potential as a way to innovate as an entrepreneur

23:31 – How “thinking small” can be the key to then think big

26:41 – How connecting internal stakeholders with customer problems expedited improvements for Amazon’s baby registry program

28:55 – “Go Bigger” and “go faster” questions anyone can use to help their team innovate

32:15 – What to do when you need to align stakeholders faced with multiple negative options