“No, Kristi, it’s not, and you are right to look surprised because it’s fucking insane that every price on this website is set manually by a buyer. So I’m hired to fix it, give buyers their time back to do something more productive. But guess what: every time I turn around I discover some new team of buyers asking, ‘Who is this guy and why the fuck is he here?’ I explain my charter and they freak because they didn’t get to have input into the requirements, because I didn’t know their team fucking existed and vice versa. So they escalate to their director, he throws a fit, and I’m back gathering requirements again while the engineers threaten to abandon the project if I keep making them wait. This is normal to some extent, Kristi. To some extent this is just what a product manager does. But it goes beyond normal at Amazon, because people are like mushrooms here.”