How did a missing German string win an Amazon engineer the Just Do It Award, according to Steve Huynh?

Steve Huynh tells the story of a junior engineer friend on Amazon's search results team who noticed that a low-stock notice was missing from the German version of the page. Instead of just adding the text to the localization database, he ran an A/B test, which took under an hour to set up at Amazon, and found the string was worth roughly $2 million a year in gross sales. He received the Just Do It Award, shook Jeff Bezos's hand on stage and was promoted immediately.

• Amazon's Just Do It Award recognizes initiative, or bias for action, and comes with a Nike shoe presented by the CEO.
• Huynh notes the fix involved no code at all; the measurement is what made it visible.
• Huynh's lesson is to know which metric you will move and how you will size the impact before starting work.

▸In their words

“It turns out that that string was worth something like $2 million per year in gross sales.” Steve Huynh · at 4:44 — open in the transcript →

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on A Life Engineered (2026-10-12). Read the whole episode summary →

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