Today, Doug Herrington and John Felton shared the following messages with Amazon employees.
I want to share with you that John Felton will be taking on a new role as SVP and AWS CFO, reporting to Brian Olsavsky. John has been with Amazon for over 19 years, including the last 12 years within Operations, and we are lucky to have benefited from his many talents within Worldwide Stores. I want to thank him for everything he’s done for the Worldwide Operations team. Most recently, John and his teams have led the successful work to regionalize our U.S. network, both improving our delivery speeds for customers and reducing our cost to serve. He leaves our Operations network in a strong place.
With John’s transition, I’m pleased to share that Udit Madan will take over leading Worldwide Operations. In his 15+ years with Amazon, and most recently as the leader of our global delivery services, Udit has demonstrated a deep customer obsession and a passion for innovation. I’m excited to work even more closely with him as he and the team double down on reinventing ways to further advance our work to improve delivery speeds, widen selection, and lower our cost to serve customers.
Please join me in congratulating John and Udit on their new roles. I have loved spending time in many of our Operations sites over the past 18 months, and am energized by the work happening across Operations and the entire Stores organization. I am incredibly excited about what 2024 has in store for our team and the continued improvements in customer experience that we will deliver together.
Doug
I want to thank Doug for the kind words. This is definitely a bittersweet email for me because I have loved my time in Operations. It has been an amazing 12 years with six in finance and six in the business. Every day I come to work amazed and impressed by how this team is able to deliver for customers. Operations has always been about how we get to world class in safety, speed, cost, quality, and innovation, and what we accomplished together in 2023 was awesome to see. We lowered our cost to serve for the first time in years, while driving our fastest delivery speeds ever for Prime customers. At the same time, our recordable injury rate improved even more year over year, and it’s down double-digits since 2019. I’m incredibly proud of these accomplishments. Hard work, innovation, and your leadership made them possible.
I am really excited for the future of Operations. We have an amazing leadership team with so much diversity, experience, depth, and tenure, and I am excited to see Udit take the organization to new heights. Udit is a talented leader who has been in Operations his entire career. He was at the helm when we built Amazon Logistics, and over the past two years has grown our entire Transportation business, better connecting the middle and last mile than ever before. The plan and goals we have will continue to improve safety, speed, cost, and quality. 2023 highlighted so many new opportunities for us. I am particularly excited for the next set of innovations around inventory placement, ultra-fast delivery, and automation. The future is very bright.
I want to thank you all for your support over the years. It has been a great run and a time that I will cherish with pride. Good news is that I’m not going far and am excited to share many of the skills I learned from you all in Operations with the AWS team. Please keep delivering for customers!
-John
