This is a retailer and not a software shop, everything is centered around pushing subscriptions and sales. Upper management fears upsetting content providers, and so they won't innovate around their central product line. All feature development is driven by Product Managers who only ever think 3-6 months ahead and rarely try to Think Big. Success is measured in new subscribers gained or lost.
Most products get out the door several months late as an "MVP" that went through multiple internal versions. Once it is in customer's hands, it gets abandoned and never improved (see Badges, Clips, Book Sharing, and more). Product Managers come with half baked ideas and expect engineers to divine their intention and build it perfectly. If things get behind due to changing requirements, they try to throw people at the problem leading to more overhead and later projects.
The tech organization is chaotic, with constant reorganizations and no ownership. Big Picture Buzzword ideas are proscribed from above with no thought on implementation detail or even the outline of a plan. Every project is either in development hell (infinite churn before launch) or it's deprecated the moment it's released. Tech debt is completely ignored until it completely overwhelms a team and then management wonders how things got so bad.
Rather than take what Amazon provides as tools and try to focus on new features or tech, middle and upper management constantly want to make Audible "different", leading to a lot of reimplementation of existing functionality. There are a lot of creative engineers, especially young ones, who could be a true asset to the company if their ideas were considered or if they were given more ownership and authority. Sadly, if it isn't exactly how the senior leadship want it, there is no chance it will get shipped. Right down to the size of a link and the color of a button.
