Customer Experience Keynote
Your Customer Experience Strategy Is a Poster. Amazon Made It an Operating System.
Every company says customer experience matters. Most stop at inspiration. John Rossman helped build the mechanisms that made customer obsession run every decision at Amazon. In this keynote, he shows your team how to move customer experience off the poster and into the operating system: what you build, what you kill, and where you place your biggest bets. Based on his bestseller The Amazon Way.
Let John Tell You About It
If you are looking for a way to improve how you manage your own company or are just curious about an inside look at how amazon works this is a great place to start. Of all the books I’ve read on amazon this one seems the most useful and insightful.
This book effectively captures the essence of amazon’s leadership. The heart of Amazon is finally revealed. John Rossman excels at paying attention to the details.
What this book does well is capture the excitement of Amazon. I read this book in one day and had trouble putting it down. It was that interesting.
You can’t afford not to read this book if you own your own company. It is that good!
~The Rebecca Review
John's insights have been featured in
Rossman’s Classic Keynote on Customer Obsession & The Amazon Leadership Principles
Most companies treat customer experience as a campaign. A new survey. A journey map. A dashboard that finally turns green. Then the hard tradeoffs hit, the quarter gets tight, and the customer quietly loses.
Amazon ran it differently. Customer experience wasn’t a campaign. It was an obligation wired into how every decision got made, at every level, every day. That’s the difference between customer experience as inspiration and customer obsession as an operating system. One looks good in a town hall. The other tells you what to build, what to kill, and where to place your billion-dollar bets.
John Rossman was there for the formative years, when Amazon figured out it wasn’t a retailer but a platform. They didn’t rely on inspiration. They built principles and mechanisms that made customer obsession inevitable by working backwards from the customer.
In this keynote, your team learns the frameworks that make it real. Working Backwards, so you start with the customer, not the slide. Invent and Simplify, applied to how you work, not just what you ship. Outcome orientation that breaks through polite politics and forces real collaboration across teams.
This isn’t about copying Amazon. It’s about your customers, your culture, your business. Because everyone has to play from the same high-ambition playbook. Yours. You can build this too.
Praise for John
"An amazing event! John really helped us think in terms of the championship habits. Highly recommend John for your corporate event!"
- Frank Marini, President & CEO
"He set the tone on transformational leadership and gave the necessary tools for participants to execute. John was ranked the highest speaker at our event!"
- Maria, VCA
"I learned more in John's 90-minute keynote than I learned from my NYU MBA program. That sounds like hyperbole, but it's not. Everything we studied about strategy was theoretical. This was the actual playbook—how Amazon makes decisions, how they spot market shifts before competitors, how they build mechanisms that force customer obsession into daily operations. My team is still referencing the framework six months later."
- Private Equity Event Attendee
"Wow! Our team loved John’s Big Bet Leadership presentation. The message was spot on for our digital journey. We are ordering more books now."
- Keith Nelson, Manufacturing Executive
“The audience LOVED your leadership keynote and they took away many key learnings that they hope can be applied moving forward.”
– NOVARTIS
"The Big Bet Leadership keynote delivered an unparalleled journey through innovation and leadership excellence. Its profound insights have invigorated our team, equipping us to navigate our industry with newfound clarity and velocity. This keynote set a new benchmark for our team’s leadership excellence. John was incredible in preparing & interacting with our team!"
– Frank Marini, CEO of Railbookers, 2024
IT’S NOT ABOUT AMAZON
WHAT YOUR TEAM LEAVES WITH
- Experience vs. obsession. Why customer experience as inspiration quietly dies the moment hard tradeoffs hit, and what it takes to make it an obligation instead. You’ll diagnose which one your company actually runs on.
- Working Backwards. The mechanism for starting every decision with the customer, not the slide. How to apply it to launches, strategy, and how you organize.
- Mechanisms over motivation. How to build systems that force customer obsession into daily decisions, so it survives after the offsite ends. With specific examples you can take home.
- Outcome orientation. How to shift from activity metrics to outcomes, and why that breaks through polite politics to create real collaboration across teams.
- Invent and Simplify. How simplifying the way you work, not just what you ship, creates speed and room to innovate.
- The principles behind it. The performance standards that decide how calls get made at every level, starting with Customer Obsession. How to translate them without copying them.
- Your playbook. A roadmap to turn all of this into your culture and your decision system. Not Amazon’s. Yours.
John Rossman
Digital and Innovation Keynote Speaker
Author | Advisor | Founder
About John Rossman
John Rossman launched Amazon Marketplace and has spent twenty years advising Fortune 1000 enterprises, mid-market companies, and startups on competitive advantage and operational excellence.
He’s the author of four best-selling books including The Amazon Way, Think Like Amazon, and Big Bet Leadership. He served as Senior Innovation Advisor at T-Mobile, Senior Technology Advisor at the Gates Foundation, and Managing Director at Alvarez & Marsal.
John goes beyond keynote speaking—he works with leadership teams to apply these principles into their business and culture as advisor and executive coach.
John's Bestselling Books
Leadership + Strategy books creating lasting impact and business results
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