One of the more revealing questions I ask when meeting with a vendor organization is surprisingly simple:
Who owns your Amazon business?
I’ve asked some version of that question for years. Sometimes while working inside Amazon. More often while advising teams responsible for growing and managing their Amazon business. The answer has become one of the fastest ways I know to assess the health of an organization.
At first glance, the question seems straightforward. In practice, it rarely is.
Sales may own the relationship. Marketing may own content and advertising. Operations may own forecasting and inventory planning. Finance may own financial reporting. E-commerce may coordinate activity across the channel. Each answer is reasonable because each function genuinely influences the business.
What I’ve found, however, is that influence and ownership are not the same thing.
Many Amazon businesses are managed, but very few are owned.
That distinction may sound subtle, but it has meaningful consequences. When responsibility becomes distributed across multiple teams, each function naturally focuses on its own priorities. Marketing manages content and advertising. Operations manages inventory. Finance manages profitability. Sales manages the relationship. The business receives attention from many directions, yet nobody feels responsible for the outcome as a whole.
In those situations, the organization often appears healthy from the outside. Teams meet regularly. Projects move forward. Performance is reviewed. Problems are discussed. Yet progress tends to be slower than expected. Decisions take longer. Priorities shift. Issues remain unresolved despite broad agreement that they deserve attention.
Over time, I began noticing that many of the challenges attributed to Amazon were actually ownership challenges in disguise.
Inventory issues persisted despite widespread recognition that they needed attention. Profitability concerns appeared in business review after business review without a clear path toward resolution. Advertising discussions continued for months despite no agreement on the objective the advertising was intended to support. The common thread was rarely a lack of effort or capability. More often, the organization lacked a clear answer to who was ultimately responsible for the outcome.
Amazon has a way of exposing these situations because the platform produces constant feedback. Inventory positions change. Purchase orders fluctuate. Margins move. Performance is measured relentlessly. Weak ownership structures that might remain hidden elsewhere become increasingly visible because their consequences eventually appear in operational and financial results.
Several years ago, I worked with an organization that was frustrated by inconsistent Amazon performance. The team was talented. Leadership was engaged. The products were strong. Yet the business struggled to build momentum.
As we worked through the situation, a pattern emerged. Different functions were responsible for different parts of the business, but nobody was responsible for the business itself.
Initially, the distinction seemed minor. After all, every important area had an owner. Inventory had an owner. Advertising had an owner. Forecasting had an owner. Profitability had an owner.
The problem was that nobody owned the decisions and tradeoffs that existed between those functions.
As a result, decisions moved slowly. Priorities changed frequently. Accountability became difficult to establish. None of those issues appeared in Vendor Central, yet all of them influenced what eventually appeared in Vendor Central.
The business improved over time, but not because a new tactic was discovered. It improved because ownership became clearer. As ownership improved, decisions became easier to make. As decisions became easier to make, execution became more consistent.
Experiences like that are one reason I’ve become increasingly convinced that ownership is one of the most underappreciated growth levers available to vendor organizations.
Unlike advertising, content, pricing, or inventory, ownership rarely appears on a KPI scorecard. It is difficult to measure directly. Its effects are often visible only through second-order outcomes such as decision quality, organizational alignment, and execution consistency. By the time improved performance becomes visible, the role ownership played in creating it is often overlooked.
The strongest Amazon leaders I’ve worked with were not necessarily the people with the deepest tactical expertise. What distinguished them was their willingness to assume responsibility for outcomes beyond their immediate area of control. They viewed the business as a whole rather than a collection of functions. When problems emerged, they did not ask whose issue it was. They viewed the issue as part of a business they owned.
When an Amazon business begins to struggle, leaders naturally focus on performance metrics. Sales trends, profitability, inventory health, and advertising efficiency are all important places to look.
I’ve simply found that another question often deserves equal attention.
Not who owns advertising.
Not who owns inventory.
Not who owns forecasting.
Who owns the business?.
The answer frequently explains more than the metrics themselves.
