Dive Brief:

• Jim Freeman, a vice president at Amazon charged with the supervision of all messaging and communication products, moved on from the company in April to join German footwear and fashion e-commerce company Zalando, CNBC reported.
• Freeman is the second prominent member of the Alexa team to leave the company in April, and one of over a dozen executives and top managers to leave the Amazon in the past 10 months.
• Freeman joined Amazon nine years ago, and was running the company’s video team, including Prime Video and Amazon Studios, when he left in 2016 for a six-month stint at Zalando, according to his LinkedIn profile. He returned to the company in March of last year to join the Alexa team, presumably working on video. 

Dive Insight:

Everybody likes a winner. That’s likely one reason so many executives are being poached from Amazon. Another is that the company has a hard-driving corporate culture that is widely known for burning people out.

It’s was not immediately clear what caused Freeman’s second departure from Amazon. Various hints in media reports point to both of the above reasons. The Alexa team is under intense pressure from competitors Google and Apple. 

While Amazon did not immediately respond to an email from Retail Dive requesting comment about Freeman, CNBC reported a company statement: "It's simply incorrect to suggest that we have an executive retention issue. Amazon is the most attractive place to work in the U.S., according to LinkedIn, and we have nearly 95% retention among our vice presidents. For 20 years it's been the case that a handful of executives have come and gone — for personal or professional reasons — and that's true at any company. What's unique about Amazon is that many come back — we call them 'boomerangs'."

There is a growing need for talented tech and engineering people in retail. Some retailers, like Walmart, are cutting traditional roles while adding 500 tech people. The Home Depot is adding more than 1,000 tech employees. But Amazon is adding many thousands – 2,000 in Boston, 3,000 in Vancouver, 200 in Minneapolis, more in new facilities like in Kansas City, Kansas. This creates an especially strong demand for those who have demonstrated their tech and management skills with successful companies, as Freeman did with Amazon.

In late April, Charlie Kindel, founder and leader of Alexa Smart Home at Amazon, left the company. Kindel said he needed “a serious break” and changed his title on LinkedIn to read "officially goofing off." If not a case of burn out, it was something related.

Reports about high-level executive departures at Amazon abound. Uber recently hired away Amazon’s vice president of voice shopping, Assaf Ronen. Shortly before Ronen’s exit, Greg Greeley, Amazon vice president of Prime Worldwide left the company to head up Airbnb Homes. Last year, another prominent Alexa exec, Mike George, vice president of Echo, Alexa and Appstore, retired after 19 years with Amazon. He had led the development of the Echo smart speaker and the Alexa virtual assistant, and he described his retired role in binary code on LinkedIn. However, CNBC said George has returned to the company.