Shadowing Practice: "Customer Obsession" Leadership Principle Explained by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Customer obsession.
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So leaders start with the customer and work backwards.
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They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust.
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Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
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I'm intentionally starting with customer obsession because, frankly, everything starts with the customer and works backwards from there at Amazon.
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That's the way we think about our business.
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And it's always been true.
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It's always been palpable in the whole time that I've been here.
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And it's part of what attracted me to Amazon 26 and a half years ago, which was you could really feel that this was a culture
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and a company that not just talked about doing right by customers, but walked that walk.
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We're all customers of so many businesses, and we all know what we're treated like.
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And typically, companies talk about being customer -focused, but rarely are.
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And I really think Amazon has always been, and you've seen it from the beginning up to now, all sorts of examples of that.
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But I remember the first full year I was at Amazon,
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one of the big debates that year was whether or not we should have customer reviews on books detail pages.
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We were a books -only retailer at that point.
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And the debate really was because publishers didn't want us to have customer reviews because some of them might be negative.
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But the reality is, if you're trying to help customers make the best possible decision for themselves on whether they want a product or not,
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having honest customer reviews is incredibly helpful.
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So we decided to have those customer reviews.
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And you can see that customer focus all the way up to today.
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Just look at what happened during the pandemic, where we had this very uncertain economy, where every company in the world,
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including Amazon, was trying to save money however they could.
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most technology companies looked at that environment and said,
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we're going to find a way to extract every last dollar from our customers in this tight economy.
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Amazon did the opposite.
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In our cloud computing business and AWS, we proactively went to customers and tried to figure out how we could cost -optimize for them,
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where they could save money, so they could redeploy that money in the future on projects that actually could help their business,
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and they could live to fight another day in a difficult economy.
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That's pretty different.
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And you can see it in how we do our product development here at the company as well.
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We won't write lines of code until we do the working backwards documents,
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a press release to make sure that if we built the product we know that it's going to matter for customers.
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And then a frequently asked questions document where we really try and vet ahead of time all the things customers care about.
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What problem are we trying to solve?
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What will customers care most about?
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What would they be most disappointed about if we launch with this set of features?
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What will they love most?
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All the things that make it work for customers.
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That's what we're always trying to figure out.
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Now, I have also seen over time sometimes people get confused about how competitors
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or economics come into play when you think about the leadership principle of customer obsession.
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People wonder, well, am I being customer obsessed if I'm thinking about sustainability and economics of what I'm doing?
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And, you know, of course, many of us remember in the early 2000s, the company Cosmo, which promised one -hour delivery of videos to your house.
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They actually delivered a lot of ice cream to my house, too, by the way.
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I really enjoyed the service, but it was not economic.
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And the business lasted a year or two, and then it was gone.
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And you're not really doing right by customers over a long period of time
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if you get them excited about something that you can't sustain.
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So, of course, you have to think about economics when you're thinking about what you're building.
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And then some people ask, well, am I being customer obsessed if I think about what competitors have offered
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and try to address something competitors have put out that customers like?
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And the reality is that if you're trying to build the best possible customer experience, you have to be aware of what competitors are doing.
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And if competitors build something that we haven't, by the way, we're very inventive and we're very customer focused,
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but we're not going to build every single new feature that customers love.
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There are going to be others that do so as well.
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And if a competitor builds something that customers love, we should be aware of it and we should be inspired by it
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and think about how we can improve our own customer experience with what we learn from what competitors have done.
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So we always are going to have to be aware of competitors and economics and building the best customer experience,
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but we're going to spend most of our waking hours focused on what we know customers care most about.
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And the reality is that everybody at this company has not just the freedom, but really the expectation to look at what customers want
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and figure out how we can be better and better for them every day.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “"Customer Obsession" Leadership Principle Explained by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: customer, competitor, Amazon, economic, reviews. This video has 62 sentences and 898 words to shadow. The speech runs for 4:36. The speaker talks fast, about 195 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 91% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| competitor noun | /kəmˈpɛt.ɪ.tɚ/ | A person or organization against whom one is competing. |
| economics noun | /ˌiːkəˈnɒmɪks/ | The study of resource and wealth allocation, consumption, and distribution, of capital and investment, and of management of the factors of production. |
| obsession noun | /əbˈsɛʃən/ | The quality of being obsessed; an unshakeable feeling that one topic or activity must be pursued above other interests. |
| backward adjective | /ˈbækwɚd/ | Situated toward or at the rear of something. |
| earn verb | /ɝn/ | To gain (success, reward, recognition) through applied effort or work. |
| confused adjective | /kənˈfjuːzd/ | unable to think clearly or understand |
| cloud noun | /ˈklaʊ̯d/ | A visible mass of water droplets suspended in the air. |
| helpful adjective | /ˈhɛlp.fl̩/ | Furnishing help; giving aid; useful. |
| disappointed adjective | /ˌdɪsəˈpɔɪnɪd/ | Defeated of expectations or hope; experiencing disappointment; let down. |
| rarely adverb | /ˈɹɛəɹli/ | Not occurring at a regular interval; seldom; not often. |
| solve verb | /sɒlv/ | To find an answer or solution to a problem or question; to work out. |
| incredibly adverb | /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/ | In an incredible manner; not to be believed. |
| principle noun | /ˈpɹɪn.sɪ.pəl/ | A fundamental assumption, fundamental law or guiding belief. |
| attract verb | /əˈtɹækt/ | To pull toward without touching. |
| publisher noun | /ˈpʌblɪʃɚ/ | A person or (especially) a company who publishes, especially books. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| put out verb | To blind (eyes). |
| see over verb | To inspect something fully. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- That's the way we think about our business.
- What problem are we trying to solve?
- That's what we're always trying to figure out.
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 22 contractions and reduced forms, such as we're, you're, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: obsession /əbˈsɛʃən/, publisher /ˈpʌblɪʃɚ/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, intentionally /ɪnˈtɛn(t)ʃənəli/
- Long words — get the stress right: competitor /kəmˈpɛt.ɪ.tɚ/, economics /ˌiːkəˈnɒmɪks/, disappointed /ˌdɪsəˈpɔɪnɪd/, incredibly /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like competitor, economics, obsession.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.