Any Amazonian will tell you that it is always Day One. If you are unaware of the Day One philosophy, it may be worth reading “The Amazon Management System“, or “Always Day One“. I am not an Amazon groupie, but I do appreciate specific components of their structure, and “Day One” is something worth discussing. It is something I give a lot of thought to and something I think is overlooked too often.
I see Day One philosophy as a way to stay focused on what is critically important to business and projects. When you start a business or a new project, the initial activities are fairly broad and tend to adress important questions like “what are you trying to acheive” and “what is the actual customer need”? On day one, your are focused on being agile, shifting to answer core questions, innovate toward the target, and experiment with different options. It is far from the more boring concepts of minor incremental updates, and way more exciting.
What better time to refresh my thinking on Day One philopsophy than January 1st – the day one-est of day ones? As we roll into 2026, I am reflecting on the end of year three as a co-founder of KumoMTA – a revolutionaly company in many ways. We ask ourselves on a regular basis “what are we trying to acheive?” and “what do our customers need to be succesful?” Thinking like a user has been core to our success and keeps us from falling into complacency, but this is not a new thing for me. When I started my last company (Aasland Technologies) in 1996, thinking outside the box was the whole business model. Day One thinking was the whole point, a year before Jeff Bezos wrote his first letter to shareholders.
The idea is to approach everything like it is a new adventure, being willing to re-evaluate with a fresh view, or a clean slate. When you start saying things like “that’s the way we’ve always done it”, then you’ve lost. January 1st is a great time to think about all those things that have become comon and routine and think about what you could do differently if you were not constrained to that history. As they say, today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Be awesome; Change the world.
The Bleeding Edge 