Melissa Mohr spent 13 years at Amazon. She helped build Amazon’s Canadian toy business, worked on the company’s early push into online groceries, and then spent about nine years working on Alexa and the smart home. Today, she’s SVP of Product at Vivint.
None of that was part of some carefully mapped career plan.
Mohr studied animal science in college. She expected to spend her career working with horses. Instead, she ended up helping solve some of the strange problems that come with trying to change how millions of people shop and live.
On Keep Going, Mohr talked about what she learned along the way. Much of it came down to a simple idea: careers are built as much from the things that go wrong as the things that go right.
You Don’t Need to Know Everything Before You Start
When Mohr joined Amazon’s Alexa smart home team, she had no professional background in smart home technology.
In fact, she didn’t have any smart home devices in her own house.
“I knew nothing about smart home,” she said.
She joined anyway.
She would spend roughly nine years working on Alexa, moving from the early days of asking Alexa to turn lights on and off toward much deeper home automation and personalization.
Her career is a useful answer to one of the questions that stops people from making a move: Am I qualified enough?
Sometimes you aren’t.
The better question may be whether you can become qualified.
Mohr credits part of her success at Amazon to the company’s willingness to put smart people into unfamiliar problems and allow them to figure things out. But that freedom came with responsibility. She had to understand the business, understand its numbers, understand the customer, and learn enough about each new field to make good decisions.
The lesson isn’t to fake expertise. It’s almost the opposite.
Know what you don’t know, then start learning.
Progress Can Be Very Small
Amazon Grocery presented a completely different problem.
Selling books and toys online was one thing. Selling groceries meant dealing with expiration dates, shipping costs, inventory rotation, customer habits, and products that could become worthless before Amazon managed to sell them.
There wasn’t one great idea that fixed everything.
Mohr’s team tested somewhere around 20 or 30 user experience designs. Some worked. Plenty didn’t. Instead of waiting for a single major breakthrough, the team learned to pay attention to small signs that something was getting better.
“Small progress” became something worth building on.
That’s a useful way to think about almost any difficult project.
We tend to want a clear win because wins are easy to understand. You launch the company. You get the job. You sell the product. You hit the number.
Most meaningful work doesn’t happen that cleanly.
You try something. It works a little better. You try again.
Then you keep going.
AI Is Changing Jobs, But That Doesn’t Mean You Stop Learning
Mohr also has a useful view of the current fear around AI and employment.
She doesn’t think AI simply replaces an entire employee in most cases. Instead, she sees it removing parts of jobs.
Maybe 30 percent of someone’s work consists of tasks that aren’t particularly strategic. AI can take some of that work. That lets employees move faster, but it can also allow a company to accomplish the same amount of work with fewer people.
That part shouldn’t be ignored.
Mohr’s response, however, isn’t to resist the technology. It’s to learn how to use it.
Her product teams can now turn an idea into an early app prototype in hours. She looks for job candidates who have experimented with AI and figured out how it can improve their work.
The danger of refusing to experiment with AI, in her view, goes beyond AI itself.
If someone refuses to try a new tool because they don’t like it or don’t understand it, what happens when the next major change arrives?
Technology keeps moving. Careers have to move with it.
You don’t have to believe every claim about AI. You don’t have to use it for everything. But you probably do have to understand it.
Your Passion Might Not Be What You Think
Mohr’s undergraduate degree was in animal science. She expected to become an equine vet.
She also worked in thoroughbred racing after college.
Then she learned something surprising.
Turning something she loved personally into her profession wasn’t necessarily what made work satisfying.
What actually interested her professionally was solving hard problems.
“I think it’s finding something that you’re passionate about, but realizing that passion might not be a personal interest,” she said.
That’s an important distinction.
We’re often told to find the thing we love and make it our job. But loving horses doesn’t mean you have to work with horses. Loving hiking doesn’t mean you need to work for an outdoor company.
You may love solving logistical problems. Or building products. Or fixing organizations. Or working with customers.
Sometimes the subject changes while the kind of work that keeps you interested remains remarkably consistent.
Ask Yourself Where You Failed
One of Mohr’s habits is particularly relevant to Keep Going.
Every year, she conducts a serious review of her own performance.
What did she do well?
Where did she fail her team?
Where did she fail herself?
Where did she fall short of what leadership expected from her?
Then she asks why.
Mohr has brought the same practice into her product teams. Even after a highly successful product launch, she wants a postmortem. Something could have been done better.
This kind of review only works if failure isn’t treated as a verdict.
A mistake gives you information.
Use it.
The Question Mark Email
During her Amazon years, Mohr occasionally received one of Jeff Bezos’s infamous question mark emails.
A customer complaint or some other problem would reach Bezos. He would forward it down the company with a single character:
?
That was enough.
The email would work its way through management. Suddenly everyone knew there was a problem.
Mohr remembers them as terrifying.
She also remembers something else.
Bezos was usually right.
“There was always a bigger gap underneath the question mark email,” she said. The frustrating part was realizing that Bezos had spotted something her team had missed.
Those weren’t the comfortable moments of her career.
Neither were the meetings where she got torn apart. Or the managers she disliked. Or the mistakes she made.
Yet years later, those are often the experiences she values.
“The worst meetings of my life, they’re very memorable to me,” Mohr said.
When everything goes well, she argues, you often don’t improve very much.
She sees the same thing when competing with horses. Winning feels good. Falling off or getting eliminated teaches her more.
That doesn’t mean failure magically becomes pleasant. Mohr is careful about that too. Sometimes it takes a year or two before you can look back at a terrible experience and understand what it gave you.
You don’t need to enjoy the bad meeting.
You don’t need to pretend getting fired, losing, failing, or making a terrible decision feels good.
Give yourself some time.
Then ask what it taught you.
