Amazon Shuffles Its Consumer Team Leadership And Appoints Doug Herrington Leader of Stores Worldwide

Well Andy Jassy certainly isn’t wasting any time after the departure of Dave Clark.

Here are the announced changes:

First, they changed the name of the group from the Consumer group to the Stores group. Not sure why they did this or why it was necessary.

Second, Doug Herrington is the direct replacement for Dave Clark as the CEO for Worldwide Amazon Stores.

Third, John Felton the Senior VP of Global Delivery has been appointed to lead all of Operations at Amazon. John in his career had been Dave Clark’s primary financial partner for years, and has been operating the business more recently.

Fourth, Christine Beauchamp, formerly the President of Fashion but more recently the SVP of Consumer Categories was appointed to Doug Herrington’s old role as Head of North American Stores.

A number of other changes were announced, but these were the major ones.

What does this tell us?

First, Andy Jassy has known about Dave Clark’s departure for months and has worked out the succession plan for not only him but his entire management team.

Second, this is a huge step and validation for Christine Beauchamp who came into Amazon with a Fashion background but has quickly applied her skills across all categories. Previously she was running the business side of these categories, but now takes over the technology as well.

Third, and he most interesting part of this announcement to me was John Felton running all Operations at Amazon. Looking at John’s background, he has 3 years recently as Leader of the Delivery Services group and the rest of his long career at Amazon is as the primary Finance partner to Operations leadership.

I was most interested in who would land as the fulfillment leader, and what it would say about the future. John Felton’s appointment definitely fits more in the Tim Cook style of leader, financially and operationally focused rather than a logistics builder.

Given Dave Clark’s departure, and his comments about building, this is not all that surprising and given all the network optimization that needs to be done at Amazon, I am not terribly surprised by this.

Overall, a lot of this just gives you insight into how truly deep Amazon’s leadership bench is compared to others in the space. When one executive leaves, many others are ready and willing to step into the void.