Bezos likes small teams. He has a rule to keep meetings productive: make sure you can feed the whole group with two pizzas.
He hates PowerPoint presentations, preferring instead written memos for executives to discuss.
To avoid dominant personalities having too much sway, he'll sometimes go round each person at a meeting, asking how they feel about a question.
And people who know him say he likes those who push back. "We would argue, and we would scream at each other," says Shouraboura.
"Everything is very open, and on the table, and the conversations get heated and very passionate. But it's about the subject, never against the person," she says.
Amazon has a set of 14 "leadership principles", external. One of those speaks of having "the backbone to disagree".
And it seems Bezos genuinely wants to foster that culture at a higher level. Leaders should "not compromise for the sake of social cohesion", the principle says.
There are questions, however, about whether that philosophy is always interpreted correctly down the chain at Amazon.
At more senior levels however, Bezos' management style appears different. He likes his teams to have autonomy, which he believes fosters innovation.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the astoundingly successful cloud computing service, on the face of it didn't have much to do with Amazon's core business: e-commerce.
However Bezos backed the idea, giving his trusted employee Andy Jassy the freedom, and capital, to go about creating a company within a company. Bezos views Jassy as an entrepreneur, not just a manager - a key part of why he will take over as Bezos' successor.
"It's easy to be brave when you're a start-up" says Shouraboura. "As you grow it gets harder and harder to be brave, because now you're risking a lot. He was always very brave."
People who know him say that Bezos likes to approach problems "backwards". "It's a very specific process at Amazon," says Bryar.
In the planning stage teams will do a reverse timeline - start with what a launch would look like and then work backwards.
"The first thing the team does is write a press release, which is usually the last thing companies write."
This plays into Bezos' view of time. It's something he thinks about a lot. He's installed a $42m (£30m), 10,000 year clock in a hollowed out mountain in Texas. It's supposed to represent the power of "long-term thinking".
And to the fair, Bezos has always approached business with the long game in mind. People close to him often use the word "methodical" to describe the customer obsession over short-term profits.