It's probably rewriting Zoppos retail app in Amazon's retail platform. That's like a redesign, re-architect, and rewrite of the whole app, plus the whole backend pipeline. That's a huge task. Also retail is driven by huge amount of data: product category, inventory, pricing, customer info, experiment data, marketing, ad, clicks, billing, etc. Migrating those data without interruption with live operation is like changing engine in mid flight.
You're right it's pretty challenging but 27+ months and 300+ engineers challenging? I would have suspected to take half the time which makes me wonder what their architecture originally looked like and what they've been doing for so long.
What I think you're hinting at is that a development organization with nobody driving direction devolves into a pile of people working on pet projects rather than doing the terrible boring work of shipping product.
I don't see how Conway's law relates to what you said. Can you please elaborate? Do you think if no hirearchy is driving direction then there is a lack of communication between groups that work on projects?
Holacracy implies no organization. It is a freeform, organic, shapeless philosophy with possibly no direction.
The migration project has taken 27 months with 300 staff, about 8100 man-months, with apparently little to show for progress. Lots of people in a project with no tangible features, like a blob.
That's a bit of a false comparison though. Amazon developed and used AWS as it was becoming a thing and transitioned parts when certain pieces of AWS was ready for them. This Super Cloud move seems really different though if we had more details of both company's transitions this would be a little easier to talk about.
A huge task? Sure. But product catalogs and shopping carts and payment processing are 90s tech. They could have re-implemented from scratch on AWS with the same graphics assets on the front end and cut over in a fraction of the time. Instead they are trying to force a square peg into a round hole and wondering why no matter hard they push it won't go.
