An inside look at the system that will outlast Bezos—Bill Carr & Colin Bryar on lessons from Amazon
Feb 9, 2021
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Bill Carr and Colin Bryar, former Amazon executives, share insights on Amazon's culture of innovation, including the origin stories of the Kindle, AWS, and Prime businesses. They discuss the importance of full-time focus on innovation, customer obsession, diving deep, and developing controllable input metrics. They also explore the significance of balancing customer interests, transparent policies, and Amazon's structured interviewing process.
Amazon's success is driven by its culture of innovation, long-term thinking, customer obsession, and operational excellence.
Amazon's working backwards process, which involves writing press releases and FAQs, helps define customer problems and prioritize input metrics.
Amazon emphasizes the importance of detailed data gathering, structured interviews, and a comprehensive evaluation process in hiring to make data-driven decisions.
Deep dives
Amazon's ability to launch diverse businesses
Amazon has been uniquely successful in launching a multitude of businesses that differ in characteristics and skill sets. However, what these businesses have in common is Amazon's invention machine, which revolves around their 14 leadership principles and five specific processes. These processes include hiring, organizing into small teams, communicating through narratives, utilizing the working backwards product development process, and focusing on input metrics for measuring and operating the business. Amazon's success also stems from its culture of long-term thinking, customer obsession, and pride in operational excellence.
The importance of process and customer obsession
A key aspect of Amazon's success lies in its emphasis on processes and customer obsession. Amazon implements a working backwards process, where ideas are developed by writing press releases and frequently asked questions to define the desired customer problem before anything is built. They prioritize input metrics and instrument the company to measure and understand the controllable elements of their processes. This approach requires diving deep into details and avoiding micromanagement, allowing leaders to stay connected and make data-driven decisions. Additionally, Amazon's customer obsession is evident in their focus on providing tangible value, solving customer problems, and utilizing customer-centric metrics to guide their decision-making.
Learning from failures and operational excellence
One of Amazon's strengths is its ability to learn from failures and strive for operational excellence. They embrace failures as opportunities for learning and improvement, instilling a culture that supports experimentation and iterating until the best solution is found. Amazon's great operators understand the importance of drill-down processes and the significance of measuring and monitoring input metrics. They prioritize the customer experience and build mechanisms such as correction of errors reports and voice of the customer feedback to continuously improve their operations. By focusing on processes, customer obsession, and operational excellence, Amazon has been able to launch diverse businesses and maintain its market leadership.
Effective Product Development Process
In the podcast episode, the speaker discusses the process of product development at Amazon. They emphasize the importance of clearly articulating the problem to be solved for the customer and describing the proposed product in a Word document. The speaker highlights the value of writing a press release at the beginning of the process to ensure that the product idea is compelling and aligns with customer needs. By focusing on writing these documents, teams can compare and refine multiple ideas before investing resources in building prototypes or launching Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). The podcast also mentions the significance of frequently asked questions (FAQs) to address potential challenges and solutions during the product development journey.
The Importance of Data-driven Interviewing
Another key topic discussed in the podcast is Amazon's approach to hiring and conducting interviews. They emphasize the importance of gathering detailed data during interviews and structuring them around Amazon's leadership principles. Each interviewer is assigned specific principles to assess, and they use behavioral interviewing techniques to gather examples from the candidate's past experiences. After the interviews, each interviewer provides feedback and a vote on the candidate before a debrief meeting is held. In the debrief, the interviewers review each other's feedback and votes, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation of the candidate. The podcast also acknowledges that hiring decisions are not always perfect, and mistakes can happen due to biases or incomplete information. However, they highlight the benefits of focusing on the process, collecting data, and making data-driven decisions.
Today’s episode is with Bill Carr and Colin Bryar, two long-time Amazon executives who just published a new book, “Working Backwards,” which provides an inside look at how the leadership principles and business processes that have made the company so successful.
Bill started at Amazon in 1999, and went on to launch and run the Prime Video, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Music businesses before he left the company in 2014. Colin joined Amazon in 1998, as the Director for Amazon Associates and Amazon Web Services Programs. He also spent two years as Jeff Bezos’ technical advisor or “shadow,” and later served as the COO for IMDb.com.
In today’s conversation, Bill and Colin take us through Amazon’s culture of innovation and the origin stories of the Kindle, AWS, and Prime businesses. From granular details about the “working backwards” process, to an inside look at how players like Jeff Bezos and incoming CEO Andy Jassy operated up close, they share invaluable insights on diving deep and operational excellence.
Whether it’s their lessons on why innovation can’t be a part-time job, or the perils of taking a “skills-forward” approach to exploring new opportunities, or why mechanisms are more important than good intentions, there’s lots of food for thought in here for founders and startup leaders.
