Before Product Was a Function, Lessons from Amazon’s First 100 Employees | Joshua Burgin

What did product look like before product management even existed?In this episode of Zero to One, I sit down with Joshua Burgin, former Chief Product Officer at Upwind Security and early Amazon employee, to break down how product thinking evolved from the earliest days of Amazon into today’s world of AI, cloud infrastructure, and platform-scale systems.Joshua has led product and engineering across AWS, VMware, and Zynga, building and scaling products from zero to billions in revenue.We cover:The origins of product management inside Amazon’s first 100 employeesThe biggest unsolved problems in cloud infrastructure and AWS todayHow pricing strategy impacts adoption in B2B SaaS and AI platformsWhat changes when AI makes products non-deterministicWhy observability, evals, and decision-making frameworks are now core PM skillsHow to balance speed vs stability when scaling product teamsThis episode is for product managers, product leaders, and builders working in AI, SaaS, and infrastructure who want to understand what’s actually changing, and what still holds true.Find more of Joshua’s work: https://www.joshuaburgin.io/