The most transformational ideas at companies don’t always have to come from the top executives — they can also come from rank-and-file employees.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently revealed that one of the company’s most successful innovations, Amazon Prime, didn’t originate in the executive boardroom but from an unexpected source: a junior software engineer. In a reflection on the genesis of the subscription service that now boasts over 200 million global members, Bezos highlighted how the best business decisions often require taking calculated risks despite initially terrifying financial projections.
The story began with Amazon’s leadership team exploring customer loyalty programs. “We were wondering what could a loyalty program be?” Bezos recalled. “And then actually kind of a junior software engineer came up with this idea, not as a loyalty program, but this idea that we could offer people kind of an all-you-can-eat buffet of fast free shipping.”
The concept was immediately put through rigorous financial analysis, but the results were far from encouraging. “When we modeled that, so then the finance team went and modeled that idea, and the results were horrifying,” Bezos explained. “We would offer unlimited shipping. Shipping is expensive, and customers love free shipping, but we could see, I mean, again, back to that, you have to use heart and intuition. There has to be risk taking. You have to have instinct. All the good decisions have to be made that way.”
Bezos emphasized that making such decisions requires both collaborative effort and intellectual humility. “You do it with a group, you do it with great humility, because by the way, getting it wrong isn’t that bad. That’s the other thing,” he said. “When we make mistakes and we’ve made doozies like the Fire Phone and many other things that just didn’t work out, I could—we don’t have enough time for me to list all of our failed experiments, but the big winners pay for thousands of failed experiments.”
The early days of Prime were indeed financially challenging, validating the finance team’s initial concerns. “So you try something like Prime and it was very expensive at the beginning. It cost us a lot of money because what happens when you offer a free all-you-can-eat buffet? Who shows up to the buffet first? The heavy eaters. It’s scary. It’s like, oh my God, did I really say as many prawns as you can eat?” Bezos noted with characteristic humor.
Despite the initial financial strain, Amazon’s leadership could see promising trend lines emerging. “And so that is what happened, but surely we could see the trend lines, we could see that all kinds of customers were coming and they appreciated that service,” Bezos concluded.
This revelation underscores a broader trend in corporate innovation where groundbreaking ideas increasingly emerge from employees across all organizational levels. Similar stories have emerged from other tech giants: Google’s Gmail originated from an engineer’s 20% time project, while 3M’s Post-it Notes came from a scientist trying to create a strong adhesive but instead discovering a repositionable one. Amazon Prime’s success—generating an estimated $25 billion in annual subscription revenue—demonstrates how companies that foster environments where junior employees can contribute transformational ideas often reap the greatest rewards. The service has evolved far beyond free shipping to include streaming services, grocery delivery, and exclusive deals, fundamentally reshaping consumer expectations and retail competition globally.