Amazon devices chief Panos Panay on the importance of failure and bouncing back from it

Amazon devices executive Panos Panay told founders at TechCrunch Disrupt that failure is an unavoidable part of building ambitious products. He pointed to Microsoft’s Surface RT launch and its nearly $1 billion write-down as an example of how teams must examine bad decisions, learn from them, and keep pursuing the broader vision.

Panay’s comments reflect a product leadership mindset that treats setbacks as structured learning rather than terminal events. For startups, the message is that resilience matters, but so does postmortem discipline: identifying the strategic, software, inventory, or go-to-market choices that made failure likely.