Jeff Bezos explains the idea of “paper cut” teams

February 21, 2025

“There are big things that are really important to manage — and by the way, it’s astonishingly hard to focus on just the big things. Even though they’re obvious, they’re really hard to focus on. But in addition to that, there are all these tiny customer deficiencies. We call those ‘paper cuts,’ and we make long lists of them. Then we have dedicated teams that go fix paper cuts. That’s because the teams that are working on the big issues never get to the paper cuts. They never work their way down the list. They’re working on big things — as they should and as you want them to — so you need special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts.”