Small fires don’t matter, but some do

There’s a story of how Amazon does exception reporting. Every week, the customer complaints team goes through a list of exceptions and rare instances that aren’t the norm.

In one instance, they noticed that they double charged a small fee, that would later be reversed. Nothing they had to fix, but the team dug deeper.

As it dug deeper, it uncovered a much more serious root case that had a systemic influence on the charging systems for many other cases!

Thanks to this analysis, they caught it early, and fixed a bug that otherwise would’ve been costly.

The rule of thumb here is one I get from Ray Dalio at Bridgewater Capital: You can only safely ignore a small fire if you have done the analysis to check its root cause. Otherwise, one small fire might, in reality, be a hundred.