At Amazon, logistics sits at the heart of its promise to customers, built on speed, reliability, and constant reinvention at scale. Over the years, the company has transformed supply chains from linear, cost-focused systems into highly connected, technology-driven networks that respond in real time to shifting demand and disruption. In this conversation, Apoorva Prasad, Vice President-Global Logistics, Amazon, traces that evolution through her own journey, from starting on the frontline during peak season to leading global operations. She reflects on how leadership changes with scale, what it takes to build resilient and adaptive supply chains, and how Amazon is using AI and automation not just to improve efficiency but to anticipate and manage real-world disruptions.
Having spent close to 15 years at Amazon, how has your perspective on operations and leadership evolved as you moved from on-ground roles to leading global teams?
Early in my career, the focus was very much on execution. I spent my time on the frontline solving real-time issues across the network: missed pickups, damaged shipments, and mismatches between capacity and demand. You are constantly in a state of emergency, and your success hinges on your ability to quickly and effectively diagnose and resolve problems. That experience builds strong instincts and a deep sense of ownership. As I moved into leadership roles, the biggest shift was learning to step back from that instinct to solve everything myself. Leadership at scale requires a different muscle: knowing when to be prescriptive versus when to give your team space to solve problems on their own. Early on, I leaned heavily on being directive because I knew how to get to the answer. Over time, I learned that building strong teams means creating the conditions for others to arrive at those answers, often better ones, independently. That transition, from firefighting as a strong IC to empowering teams, was one of the most important evolutions in my leadership style. It pushed me to focus less on immediate fixes and more on building mechanisms, developing people, and scaling decision-making. At the same time, my perspective broadened. I moved from asking “how do we solve this problem?” to “are we solving the right problem?” and “how does this issue show up for the customer?” You start to see how operations, product, technology, and network design intersect and how decisions in one area ripple across the entire system. Leadership becomes less about direct execution and more about setting direction, aligning teams, and ensuring the organisation can operate effectively at a global scale.
You started at Amazon as a seasonal frontline associate and are now leading a global organisation as a vice president. Which experiences have been most formative in your journey as a leader, and how have they shaped where you are today?
One of the most formative experiences in my career was starting on the frontline as a network operations associate, and my first day was Black Friday, one of the busiest days of the year. I got to see the full picture – how a package goes from purchase order to customer delivery, the technology that makes it happen, and where things hold up or fall apart under pressure. More importantly, it taught me how failures propagate: how a breakdown in one part of the network can cascade across carriers, shippers, and downstream operations and ultimately impact customers. That grounding in the real-world consequences of decisions has stayed with me and continues to shape how I think about building and scaling systems. From there, what accelerated my growth was the combination of opportunity and expectation. Early on, I was given responsibilities ahead of my experience, building teams from scratch, managing across geographies, and launching new processes without a clear playbook. Those “sink or swim” moments forced me to operate in ambiguity, make decisions with imperfect information, and learn quickly. Equally important were the people I worked with and for. I had leaders who set a high bar, showed me what good looks like, and trusted me with meaningful ownership. I also learned a tremendous amount from peers and stakeholders who challenged assumptions, brought different perspectives, and pushed for better outcomes. That combination played a significant role in my development as a leader. Serving as a technical advisor, an opportunity where I got to closely partner with and shadow the SVP of worldwide operations, provided a completely different vantage point. It allowed me to step back and see the organisation at a global, end-to-end level: how decisions are made, how priorities are set, and how large-scale transformations are driven. Moving across roles in the first mile, middle mile, last mile, and product and technology, I developed a holistic view of how the system fits together, from execution to building scalable capabilities, and learnt the importance of staying close to the details.
Starting with the pandemic, global supply chains have faced sustained disruption. Is Amazon rethinking its model toward redundancy?
I wouldn’t frame it as a shift toward redundancy as much as a shift toward intentional resilience. The reality is that disruption, whether it’s port congestion, labour strikes, the Suez Canal blockage, or instability in the Red Sea, may all seem very different, but they all expose the same underlying challenge: networks built for efficiency around a single path do not adapt well when that path is disrupted. So, the question is not whether to add blanket redundancy but how to design networks that can adapt quickly without structurally carrying unnecessary cost. What that has driven is a move toward building more resilience into our supply chain, expanding optionality across lanes, modes, and service options, and investing deeply in technology to enable real-time visibility and dynamic decision-making. It has also forced much tighter coordination between global and domestic networks, because when disruptions occur upstream, it impacts inventory availability and delivery promises downstream.
This is an abridged version of the interview published in the May edition of the Logistics Insider Magazine. To read the complete article click here.
