I sat down with Werner Vogels

Overview
A senior leader recounts a private fireside chat with Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, at Startup Summit 2025. The post distills Vogels' practical advice for technical leaders on focusing on real problems, designing for failure, making reversible decisions, prioritising security, leveraging AI for productivity, and building critical infrastructure only when necessary.

Key Takeaways

• Solve problems, not hype: focus on real business needs rather than chasing trendy technologies.
• Plan for failure, not perfection: classify systems by tolerance and allocate reliability investment accordingly.
• Reversible vs irreversible decisions: move fast on two-way doors, slow down and think deeply on one-way doors.
• Security > Operations > Cost: embed security from day one, design for maintainability, and consider scale-down as well as scale-up.
• AI gives time back: use AI to automate boring tasks so leaders can focus on product and strategy.
• Build only when you can't buy - but own the long-term: develop critical components in-house when vendors cannot meet scale or reliability needs.

Who Would Benefit

• Engineering managers and directors
• CTOs and technical founders
• Senior software engineers aspiring to leadership
• Product leaders overseeing complex systems

Frameworks and Methodologies

• Security > Operations > Cost hierarchy
• Reversible vs Irreversible decision framework (two-way vs one-way doors)