Amazon devices chief Panay: failure is an unavoidable part of building products

Panos Panay, senior vice president of Devices, Alexa and Leo at Amazon, delivered a clear message to startup founders at the TechCrunch Disrupt technology conference in San Francisco: failure is an inevitable and necessary part of building a successful product. He drew on his own career at Microsoft, where he worked for more than 19 years and went through one particularly costly failure.

Learning from mistakes

According to Panay, being willing to fail is not enough; founders actually have to experience failure. If someone has not failed, he said, they probably have not pushed the boundaries. What matters most, in his view, is drawing lessons from the setback, which means facing it and learning from it.

The Surface RT example

Panay pointed to the launch of Surface RT, Microsoft's first tablet computer, which he described as a significant failure that ended in a write-down of nearly $1 billion. He recalled appearing on a newspaper's front cover under a single word: failure. Admitting it was easy, he said; the real task was understanding what happened. In his account, the problem was not the launch moment itself but decisions made two years earlier, including incomplete software, incorrect inventory and how the product was balanced into retail.

Keeping the vision

Panay stressed that founders should not abandon their vision after a failure. He noted that Surface has since done fairly well. If a company has been learning along the way, he said, it only needs to adjust its direction, usually by about 30 degrees rather than 180. In his view, some people hang on too long because they have not accepted the moment of failure.