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Managing by exception (fixing known problems) is necessary but insufficient; leaders must also “manage by inspection.” Regularly and randomly walking through your own customer experience or internal mechanisms helps uncover invisible, systemic issues (like products quietly not shipping to entire countries) before they become full-blown crises.

Stop Trusting the Narrative and Start Inspecting

I was doing a weekly Walk-the-Store check when I saw a line of text that made me stop.

“This product does not ship to Switzerland”.

I was running the Swiss marketplace business at Amazon. The business was not performing the way we wanted. Conversion was soft and customers were not buying as much as in other countries. The working theory in the cross-border team was that we needed faster shipping. That sounded plausible. Fast shipping increased conversion and our delivery to Switzerland was the slowest of all the European countries. We were working hard to solve this issue.

Still, something in that message pulled at me. Remember a time when you spot the perfect sofa, only to notice a small sign saying it is reserved for someone else?

I clicked on a few more products. They looked fine. Then a few more. I saw the same message again.

Most senior leaders are taught to manage by exception. We dive into the red areas and focus on fixing the problems we know. But there is a danger in that rhythm. It blinds us to problems we have not yet discovered.

A category leader once told me he did a weekly deep dive into a random part of his business. No crisis. Just curiosity on a schedule. He said he always found something worth fixing. It kept his team attentive and kept him grounded in reality.

Walk-the-Store is the retail version of diving deep. In brick and mortar shops, managers walk the aisles every day. Online, it means clicking through your own website as if you were a customer. It sounds obvious. It is amazing how much you find.

That morning, I asked the cross-border team whether this “does not ship” issue was tracked anywhere. A few years earlier they had a metric called “invalid glance views”: cases where customers viewed a product that looked promising, but for some reason could not be shipped to their country. The number had been small, around two percent, and the report was retired.

What I was seeing did not look like two percent.

At Amazon you cannot ask a tech team to drop everything based on a suspicion. Every fix competes for scarce developer time. You need data, sizing and prioritization. So I asked my team to get me the numbers.

When the report arrived, I had to read it twice.

Invalid glance views for Swiss customers were twenty-three percent.

One in four product pages showed items that could not be shipped to customers. That meant that customers were falling in love with products they were never allowed to buy. No amount of faster shipping would fix that.

We made this our top priority. It took multiple teams and far more effort than you might expect, but once solved, the customer experience improved immediately.

Managing by exception is necessary, but not sufficient. You need to manage by inspection as well.

A few simple practices to do this:

1. Once a week, pick an area that is not performing and do a deep dive beyond the existing narrative.

2. Alternate between customer walks and mechanism walks. One week behave like a customer. Another week behave like the person running the process.

3. Ask yourself the uncomfortable question. Are we solving the right problem or the convenient one?

If you never look beyond the familiar problems, you miss the invisible ones.

When was the last time you checked an area that was “doing fine”?

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