Panos Panay, senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon

Panos Panay, the head of Amazon Devices and Services, has a message for engineers, developers and product builders: stop being afraid to fail. Panay shared the advice with Amazon’s teams during his recent visit in India but he shared it on X (formerly Twitter last week). He called it a “hard-earned learning” that he believes is fundamental to how great products get built.“Fail fast. Succeed sooner. Had the opportunity to share this hard-earned learning with the teams in India last month. Grateful for the builders who keep pushing to innovate for our customers,” Panay said.

Panos Panay asks: ‘Why we avoid failing’

The challenge, Panay explained, is human nature. Most people resist acknowledging failure, and instead of stepping back and reassessing, they keep pushing forward, which he says, makes the situation worse in the process.“Fail fast! To succeed sooner. The challenge is: A lot of us don’t want to fail fast, because when you’re failing, you want to fix it because you don’t want to say your failing. It’s like our nature. And you just kind of dig the hole deeper. And it just takes you longer to fail. Or sometimes, you can correct it, sure, but it’s actually better to stop,” Panay told those in attendance.He said that people should take the learning lesson because ‘failing is not bad’.“Take the learning lesson. Go again and succeed. You’re just gonna go faster. Failing’s not bad unless you didn’t learn anything. Then it’s bad. Straight up. But you know where it’s great? When you do learn. And you know where it’s magnificent? When you apply the learnings. And you know what makes a great product? Failing first,” he added. If we see Panay’s career, he is no stranger to the experience of building, failing, and rebuilding. Before joining Amazon, he spent over a decade at Microsoft, where he led the development of the Surface line of devices.Panay called his visit to Amazon’s India teams two weeks ago “incredible”, and met with teams, toured labs and took a rickshaw ride in Bangalore traffic. He shared his experience on LinkedIn.India was incredible. Met with teams, toured a few of our labs, and even risked it all hailing a rickshaw in Bangalore traffic. Every trip hits differently, and a few things really stood out from this one: ▪️ The passion is next level. Two-pizza teams across Chennai, Bangalore, and Hyderabad are driving core innovation across silicon, Kindle, next-gen Fire TV, and Alexa+. And we’ve got 100+ Devices and Services labs constantly prototyping and testing here. ▪️ AI is accelerating everything. One locally built tool cut testing time from two weeks to 45 minutes. That’s the kind of speed that changes what’s possible for customers. ▪️ India is incredibly diverse. 22 official languages. 1,000+ dialects. Building great products here means deeply understanding local culture and creating experiences that truly resonate with customers across the country. ▪️ The food passion runs deep too. I learned you can debate food in India for hours. Thank you to the teams who welcomed me into their workspaces and showed me a bit of their culture during this trip. We’re building the future for India, with India. And we’re just getting started.