A claim, illustrated by two of Amazon's product tenets under Bezos — build for the customer, and never ship an icon without a text label — that a small set of principles the company treats as non-negotiable makes the org easier for employees to navigate: instead of re-litigating a design or business trade-off case by case, people can resolve it by checking it against the fixed principle. The value isn't in any single principle being uniquely correct, it's in the org holding it stably enough that people stop having to ask.
This is the product-tenet-level cousin of Amazon Leadership Principles (Dive Deep, Hire and Develop the Best) (people/culture-level LPs) and works the same way Good Strategy's Three Components: Pillars, Non-Focus, and Why's pillars do — stability of the frame is what generates the navigational benefit, not the specific content of any one rule.
Reported by Tamar Yehoshua (Glean), from her time at Amazon under Bezos.
Concrete examples of the fixed principles Bezos held: be customer-driven, keep everything relevant to the customer, and never use icons in the product without a text label. The specific content of the rules mattered less than their constancy — because they never moved, teams could reliably predict what leadership would and wouldn't accept without having to ask each time.