Daniel Slater

Daniel works with executives and their leadership teams to support corporate innovation efforts, helping them build and maintain a culture of innovation that accelerates experimentation, growth, and broad transformation. Daniel’s approach focuses on implementing a robust Voice of Customer that empowers builders to deeply understand and rapidly meet their customer needs and experiment on their behalf, while instituting the right inspection and governance for executive leaders to ensure their business and strategic imperatives. Daniel specializes in bringing his cultural and innovation expertise to help executives realize effective product operating models, and create freedom and consistent mechanisms that allow innovation to propagate all the way to the edge of their organization.

Daniel is an Executive in Residence at AWS. He brings a unique blend of innovation leadership and deep Amazon experience in launching disruptive and transformative products and services, and building a sustained culture of innovation. As Worldwide Head of AWS’ Culture of Innovation portfolio, and formerly Worldwide Head of Success and Growth for AWS Innovation and Transformation organization, Daniel has driven scaled solutions, global business development initiatives, disruptive business models, and impactful customer outcomes at AWS and Amazon for 20 years. Dan joined Amazon in 2006 to launch the company’s first direct-to-customer digital content offerings, including launching the Kindle global family of devices and Amazon’s global Kindle marketplaces, and launching Amazon’s self-publishing service, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), and services such as Kindle Unlimited.

Daniel brings extensive expertise across a broad range of innovation and transformation capabilities across all industries and customer lifecycles – from startup to enterprise. Daniel specializes in helping executives articulate and organize customer-centric, product-driven innovation with proven frameworks and methodologies. This includes sharing the proven, durable, mechanisms that have helped Amazon remain an innovator across its many businesses, and building similar assessments, capabilities, and mechanisms with executives tailored to their own business. Examples include sharing Amazon’s organizational approaches to sustain innovation at scale and helping executives aligning on customer business outcomes and innovation charters, and working with their leaders to conduct assessments, customer value mapping, scoping the “MLP” (most loveable product feature), and Working Backwards to organize rapid digital prototyping and production builds leveraging the latest generative and agentic AI technology.  Dan has authored multiple thought leadership publications on the topic of culture, innovation, and transformative change, including Elements of Amazon’s Day 1 Culture and Leading and Innovating with Leadership Principles.