After the failure of Fire Phone, Amazon's hardware team Lab126 began to turmoil

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The recent months have been turbulent for Lab126, with internal restructuring, changes in senior management, and many employees leaving for Yahoo or being reassigned, leaving employees anxious.

Maybe you haven't heard of Lab126, but you must know Amazon's Fire Phone. Lab126 is the team behind the Fire Phone. This R&D department in Silicon Valley was responsible for the development and operation of a series of Amazon consumer products, including Fire Phone, Siri-like Echo devices, and Kindle series products. It was once just a small subsidiary established by Amazon, specializing in the company's hardware product line. It basically kept a distance from the outside world and many things were done in secret. As the number of employees increased to more than 3,000 people, problems gradually emerged, including redundant personnel and low efficiency.

According to news from Fast Company, this internal reorganization has actually lasted for several months. Malachy Moynihan, VP of digital products at Lab126 and director of Fire TV and Echo, has resigned. Ian Freed, the VP in charge of overseeing the Fire Phone market, is also on vacation. No one knows what his next role will be at Amazon, but some say his role at Lab126 will be reduced and he may be forced to leave. The internal roles of Amazon VP Gerg Hart and Peter Larsen have also changed.

During this period, Lab126 director Gregg Zehr, with the support of Benzos and device SVP David Limp, began to reorganize the company's hardware department. David Foster, who was previously in charge of overseeing the Kinidle product line, began to be in charge of Lab 126's senior technical team and responsible for developing new products; Engineering VP Lindo St. Angel is now responsible for shipment and subsequent development of existing products; and Amazon's VP in charge of Kindle software department also left Amazon for Yahoo in December. Some people said that his departure had nothing to do with Amazon's reorganization. Amazon declined to comment on this.

Some people believe that this reorganization has a lot to do with the poor performance of Fire Phone, which has resulted in a backlog of 170 million US dollars in inventory. However, some people deny this statement. I tend to agree more with the first statement. Although Benzos himself once told Lab126 employees not to be sad about the performance of Fire Phone because the company has learned a lot of valuable things from its launch, when a product performs disappointingly in the market, the founder will not fail to move the responsible department.

Five years ago, Lab126 had only about 100 employees. Amazon only provided some Kindle e-reader devices at that time. Since then, Lab126 has grown rapidly and launched a series of hardware products, including Kindle tablets, Echo, Fire Phone, Fire TV and Dash, a device for scanning and processing orders. Every time the team makes a new product, it has to hire a product director, who will then recruit people for the projects he is responsible for. Some people say that Lab126 operates more like a startup company. This works when it is small, but once the number of people increases, this model will encounter problems to a certain extent. According to people familiar with the matter, there were 4 to 5 supervisors in the Kindle team alone. Everyone thought they were in charge of the project, but in fact no one was really in charge of the project, which led to delays in execution and low operational efficiency.

In fact, Lab126 director Gregg Zehr had discussed the reorganization with Benzos and others a few years ago, but Zehr was considered a very nice and loyal person. He knew that there would only be two head roles after the reorganization, but he had three before, including David Foster, Lindo St. Angel and Malachy Moynihan. Now that Malachy Moynihan is gone, he can finally start the reorganization.

Amazon plans to invest $55 million in Lab126 operations in the future, and it is expected to have at least 3,757 employees by 2019. Benzos previously told employees that his goal is for Lab126 to bring a product idea to market within a few months.