What was the $2 million missing-text story Steve Huynh tells about Amazon's Just Do It Award?

Steve Huynh describes a junior engineer friend who noticed a low-stock message was missing from Amazon's search results page. Instead of simply adding the text and closing the ticket, he spent about an hour setting up an A/B test first. The test showed the fix was responsible for roughly $2 million in additional annual sales, which won him Amazon's Just Do It Award and an immediate promotion.

• Huynh says the Just Do It Award came with CEO recognition and a Nike shoe handed over by Jeff Bezos on stage.
• Huynh's lesson is that the evidence, not the size of the work, made the promotion a slam dunk.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on A Life Engineered (2026-10-23). Read the whole episode summary →

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