What Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Teams Do Differently
After training 140,000 students, many who now work at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, I’ve studied what makes these teams different.
Here are three specific things backed by research you can look up.
Difference number one: They measure results, not activities.
Most teams count how many meetings they held or tasks they finished.
Top teams measure if customers are happier and if business goals are being reached.
Aaron Bjork works at Microsoft, leading their Azure DevOps team. He said this in their public documents: “Too many people turned Agile into a religion. Just because you have a Daily Scrum doesn’t mean you’re making the right decisions.”
For context, Daily Scrum is a short daily meeting where teams coordinate work.
Microsoft’s engineering documents specifically say not to focus on certain old measurements. Things like velocity, which measures team speed. Story points, which estimate how big tasks are. And completed hours.
Instead, they focus on:
- User adoption growth rates.
- Customer satisfaction scores.
- How reliable systems are by counting incidents.
- And how long users need to learn new features.
Why this matters: old metrics tell you if teams are busy. Customer metrics tell you if teams are effective.
Google’s Project Aristotle research studied 180 teams across two years. Their main finding: psychological safety, meaning people feel safe speaking up and taking risks, was the strongest sign of team success. Following processes didn’t connect to success.
Amazon’s engineering organization releases new code every 11.6 seconds on average across thousands of teams. This release speed is written about in AWS technical papers on continuous delivery.
Difference number two: They protect deep work through systems.
Microsoft wrote about their F-Crew and C-Crew rotation system in Azure DevOps engineering blogs.
Feature Crew, half the team, builds new features without interruption. Customer Crew handles urgent bugs and support requests. Engineers switch between these roles every few weeks.
This system prevents constant task switching that kills productivity.
Amazon’s Single-Threaded Ownership model, described by Senior VP David Limp, gives one leader one thing to focus on completely. His exact words: “The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job.”
Difference number three: They made things simpler.
Microsoft replaced traditional two-hour Sprint Planning meetings with 15-minute Feature Chats. Three slides, six people, decisions made. Written about in their DevOps transformation case studies.
Amazon banned PowerPoint presentations in 2004. Jeff Bezos required written documents instead. His reason: slide presentations let teams hide weak ideas that written documents expose.
Google’s official OKR guide says: “If someone consistently fully attains their objectives, their OKRs aren’t ambitious enough.” They aim for 60 to 70 percent achievement on purpose, not 100 percent, to make sure goals stretch teams.
Summary
Three proven patterns:
- Focus on result metrics over activity metrics.
- Protect focus through systems.
- Make processes simpler to reduce extra work.
These principles work for teams of any size, not just tech giants.
Question: which metric does your team track that doesn’t actually measure customer value?
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