Colin Bryar

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. Remarkable People is sponsored by the reMarkable tablet company. What a concept. The reMarkable tablet is a single-purpose tablet for taking notes. It's not an iPad, because with an iPad you'll be checking social media, answering email, watching videos, totally defocused. When you want to do deep thinking, the reMarkable tablet is the way to go.
Today's remarkable guest is Colin Bryar. Colin has a bachelor of science and a master of science from Cornell. He worked at Amazon for approximately 13 years beginning in 1988. He held three positions at Amazon, director of Amazon associates, chief of staff of Jeff Bezos, and chief operating officer of IMDb. He and Bill Carr, also a former executive with Amazon, have written a book called Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon.
If you want to create a company as successful as Amazon, you'll cherish this episode. You'll learn key concepts such as working backwards-that is doing what customers want as opposed to doing what you want-the power of the six-page narrative, why Amazon banned PowerPoint, the highly structured and disciplined Amazon recruiting procedure, and why two-pizza teams with single-threaded leadership rocks.
In short, for the inside, behind-the-scenes story of Amazon's success, you've come to the right podcast. I'm Guy Kawasaki. And now, here's the remarkable Colin Bryar.
Colin Bryar:
I started at Amazon in March of 1998. At that time, Amazon was just selling books from the U.S. They shipped overseas, but there were two fulfillment centers. I called them fulfillment centers. They were giant warehouses with bookshelves where people would walk in and pick the books.
So, I worked at Amazon for about 12 Years. I had a number of different roles. At that time, Amazon was effectively a different company every 12 to 18 months given the growth just in the scale of the business. I started out in the software team, and I was a technical product and program manager and a software development manager. And then, I moved over and did some more general management. I managed our affiliate business which was a pretty new thing at the time. We had a couple 100,000 websites who had joined the program and got to see how you build things at scale when you build some software and then deploy it out to a couple 100,000 websites. I learned a lot about that the hard way. I would say we made a lot of mistakes. It's a lot easier to do now with Amazon Web Services.
My next job was working with Jeff Bezos as his technical advisor. Internally, they call it the shadow. It's more like a chief of staff role in terms of how other companies would call it. Basically, I would spend 10 hours a day working with Jeff.
The two primary jobs in that role were, one, to make Jeff a better CEO and do what it takes, so make sure the right information and people and groups and issues get surfaced in front of Jeff, make sure that those types of meetings are productive. So, the bookends of my day would be meeting with those teams before or after Jeff to make sure that those things were followed up. But the second and perhaps more important goal of that role, as Jeff put it, was we wanted to model each other, because it's a temporary role. I was going to go somewhere else in the company, and he wanted to make sure that we thought about the issues in the same way as much as possible as I would go into another area.
So, I was there for about two years. I was fantastically lucky to have been able to do that role. I learned a ton. And then, my next role at Amazon, which was my last role at Amazon, I spent five years at IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, as the chief operating officer there. IMDb is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon. It's all about movies, TV, and everyone in the entertainment industry.
Guy Kawasaki:
When you started your chief of staff position with Jeff, did you have hair?
Colin Bryar:
A little bit more. But yeah, that's always been a challenge for me. It was a losing battle, but that's okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, I was just looking for a causative relationship. I don't want this to be an interview about Jeff, but you have some insights I suppose or I assume that very few people would have. If you indulge me for a few minutes, I'm just going to ask you some Jeff questions.
Since 1987, I've been asked what's it like to work with Steve Jobs, so I know the burden of what I'm about to ask you. What was a day in the life of Jeff Bezos like?
Colin Bryar:
One thing, Jeff, he loves what he does. He's not doing it for the fame or for a legacy. He genuinely loves creating, as he put it, Earth's most customer-centric company. That is contagious not just for me but for everyone around him. I could just tell that Jeff, he was in his element doing what he loved to do, and still to this day.
The second thing is Jeff, he's insanely customer-obsessed. You've heard it and seen it. But to actually see it in action on a daily basis, it was quite impressive in all of the different ways Jeff makes sure the customer is front and center of everything that Amazon does.
And another thing is that he's got really high standards. He holds himself to those standards, but he holds other people accountable to those standards too. What I learned about that is you can have high standards, but if you don't point them out when they're not met, what happens is you've lowered the standards. And so, Jeff is good at pointing out, here's a case where we did not meet our standards, what can we do, what can we learn from this, how can we get better so we can keep meeting or exceeding our high standards?
But I had a lot more fun in that job than I thought I would. I was told that that was going to happen by Andy Jassy who's the CEO of Amazon Web Services. He was the chief of staff before me. He said, "You're going to learn a lot. But I just want to let you know, this job is going to be a lot more fun than you think." So, it was challenging, it was hard, but it was also quite a lot of fun.
Guy Kawasaki:
Was he the kind that gets up at 4:30, goes for a 10-mile run, is in the office at 6:00, works all day, then goes out and does customer... What was his...
Colin Bryar:
I was with Jeff from about 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., maybe a half-hour earlier or later. I would come in before and stay a bit later. But he was an early riser. I obviously don't know what he was doing before he got in the office, but I definitely got email on my BlackBerry at the time very early in the morning. He likes to exercise. If we were traveling, we would go out running in the morning before we started our day. I'm a big runner.
On the weekends, a lot of CEOs walk the store, retail business, where if they're in the city, they'll go into one of their stores or a competitor's store, walk the store, and just make observations. Jeff does that. Saturday and Sunday mornings, you can tell that he's coming through the site. When he sees issues, he's a good switchboard operator, sending it to the right teams and make sure that the issues are followed up.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, this is my last Jeff question. When people ask me, what was the relationship like either for me or in general with Steve, I would use two words, which is love and fear. How would you describe Jeff's relationship with employees?
Colin Bryar:
Well, I think it's obviously different with different people. Some people, they see Jeff once a year, and that can be a nervous, intimidating time for people. So, it's hard to say what is my relationship. I can speak for myself. I can't really say what his relationship was with everything else. I consider him a friend. Whenever I see him, which isn't that much anymore, we'll laugh about things we have in common beforehand, talk about jogging. But he's very genuine, and, as I said, he has high standards. He will let you know when they are not being met. But the next moment, it's okay. He's good at context switching too; let's go focus on something else. I would call him a friend, personally.
Guy Kawasaki:
It doesn't seem like fear was the operative word.
Colin Bryar:
Let me put it this way, I was driven to succeed and make sure I was successful in my role, which a large part of that was helping Jeff be successful. I was highly motivated to do that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Completely switching gears, going down a little bit of a rat hole, I am also an author. One of the things that struck me about your book is that it's so cogently written and organized. I think that's hard enough for an author to do, but for two people to write a book and do it, it's almost impossible. How did you write this book?
Colin Bryar:
Bill and I, we were never really satisfied with the messages about what is Amazon all about, how does it work. People would ask us, "How does Amazon do it?" It was actually Bill's idea to say, "Hey, we should write a book about this." He was at a conference, and there was a CEO of a large company who said, "I don't know how Amazon does it. They're into cloud computing, devices, e-commerce, logistics. We're still trying to open our stores up the right way one by one." Bill, he thought, I actually know how Amazon does it. He told me about this conversation. I said, "That's a great idea." And I said, "We should write this book instead of you should write this book." That's when Bill and I were joined at the hip on this.
The first thing we did is we wrote a press release and FAQ. We went through the working backwards process to say, "Okay, we're about to embark on something, let's go see if there's anything there." We wrote the press release. And then the FAQ part is just where you answer hard questions about what's upcoming. One of them was, what are your goals for doing this? The number one goal was we wanted to remain friends throughout this process. We did not want this book to get in the way of that. I think that helped me put things into perspective. It was our most important thing, because we were friends outside of this book.
It was a collaborative effort. We did not know how to structure the book either, because it's not a linear story. Amazon's not a one-trick pony. What also helped is that Bill and I, my co-author Bill Carr, we spent 27 years at Amazon, but we didn't overlap a ton. We were friends outside of that. So, we had very good coverage, and we were there at pivotal times. When we did overlap, it was actually when I was working with Jeff and when Bill, he was the second employee in the digital group. Kind of on different sides of the table, so it brought different, interesting perspectives into how some of these things developed. I think that the book was better where we were both involved. Whereas, if we each wrote our separate version, not knowing how...
This is the first book I've written, so we didn't know what we were getting into. Our goal was just really to get into enough detail to help the next generation of business leaders and give those people enough information, if they decide this is the way that they wanted to build their organization or company, that they could go do it, essentially get started at least, without much involvement other than reading the book.
Guy Kawasaki:
But I really want to know was it written with Google Docs and either person could edit? Was it written with Word and then you sent the Word file, he worked on it, he sent it back to you? Did you co-write? Bill did chapters one, three, five, seven, you did two, four, six, and eight? Really, I want to know how this worked.
Colin Bryar:
Okay, so you want to go deeper. That's fine.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes.
Colin Bryar:
We used Google Docs. We started writing. The first thing that happened is Bill started writing the hiring chapter and I started writing the narratives chapter. Because we didn't even know if we had a book, we thought maybe we'll just write it and see what happens. We edited each other's work and made comments.
We sent it off to a publisher who politely said, "There's not enough space between what's out there and what you guys are writing. By the way, if you want to write a book, here's how you should go about doing this." The publisher was right, actually. I think we had missed a couple of steps. Sometimes you have to figure out when to leave the world as you find it and follow the existing process and when to try to change the world. This was probably a case of the former, especially since we were first-time authors.
I didn't even know what a literary agent was until after we wrote those two chapters; neither did Bill. So, we found an agent who explained the whole process.
Bill and I, by and large, we had a large list of topics. We struggled at first to say how much of it is a how-to book versus the four origin stories. Especially the more complicated the topics, telling stories is a great way to get that across. But we also felt that there was so much content where you have to explain things in a reference-type way. We did this hybrid. That made it easy, because it wasn't a linear flow where you had to keep every character, plot instream. That would have been much more difficult. So, we could segment different parts of the book and then add our own...
We used Google Docs. It just got bigger and bigger the more we added chapters. We didn't know how many chapters we were going to have going into the book. Some of them we threw out by saying, "This isn't really uniquely Amazonian," or "It's not going to be accreted to the book."
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, getting out of that hole, I'm just curious as an author. Because I'm telling you, it is remarkably cogent.
Colin Bryar:
Thank you very much.
Guy Kawasaki:
My hat's off to you. Some editor I'm sure helped too. But one of my favorite topics in this book is the diatribe against PowerPoint and how PowerPoint is essentially banned at Amazon. You have got to explain why and the replacement, the six-page concept.
Colin Bryar:
Sure. It was banned for meetings. It was first banned for meetings with the S team, which is Jeff's senior leaders at Amazon. For all-hands and things like that, there's still slides. Slides are a good way to do broadcasting out to a broad group. But it was banned for uses within those meetings.
It really started off that the S team met, and it was about 15 people. The senior leaders, Jeff, and I participated in those meetings. It was every Tuesday. It was scheduled from 10:00 to 2:00, but it never really ended on time. There were usually two to three groups that would come in and do presentations. It could be proposals, decision-making, updates, and anything in between. PowerPoint is typically what those teams used.
We realized that those meetings, they weren't as effective. And as Amazon was scaling, the consequences of those decisions were in the cost that making the wrong decision was growing and the issues were becoming more complicated. Different people were presenting, sometimes for the first time ever, and it was hard to get to, well, what is the real issue or the decision that needs to be made?
Jeff and I had also been reading up on Edward Tufte. He wrote this great essay, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, and talked about how it's being used for the wrong purposes. Jeff and I had been talking about that for probably two or three months beforehand. I think there was one trip that we took, and we each had a copy of the essay and we read it on the plane and chatted about it.
There was one particularly painful S team meeting. It was on a Tuesday. It wasn't the presenter. It wasn't the topic. It was just we didn't really get to what we needed to talk about. It was a waste of everyone's time, the presenter's time. The team didn't get what they wanted. S team didn't get enough information. The decisions weren't being made. At the end of the day, I was in Jeff's office, and Jeff had said, "Okay, we're going to try something, and there's going to be no more PowerPoint at S team." He said four pages at first. A lot of these processes don't come out fully formed. They morph into where you find your right stride and solution.
And so, I had then went back to my office and sent out an email: No more PowerPoints at S Team meetings. Please come with a narrative. I felt pretty good about that, and I thought, finally, we're changing things for the better. The reaction was just the opposite. It was swift, and it was universally negative. You know, "Hey, I'm presenting next week. What is a narrative? How do I write this?"
First of all, there were no exceptions. We made the switch. We ripped the Band-id. A couple of things about that I think that are noteworthy: One is it was a reversible decision. We were going to try it. If it didn't work or if it bombed, we would have gone back to PowerPoint. There was a fallback plan. Two is that we knew that the first several narratives, they could even be worse than the previous PowerPoint slick presentations. But we knew that this was something worthy to try and experiment to get better. Also, we knew that the decisions were only going to get more complicated. We needed to look at more information and make more decisions in those four-hour timeframes. Then, a year from now, two years from now, just with the way the complexity of the business was going, we knew we had to find a higher bandwidth communication and decision-making forum.
From that point on, we started writing narratives. People played games at first with changing margin sizes to try to put too much or too little information. Eventually, settled on six pages. That's about the right information density. First of all, if you look at pixel density for PowerPoint in a narrative, it's about seven to nine times more. People read faster than they talk. You can also have multi-causal concepts that come out much better in a narrative than PowerPoint. So, I think it's more than 10X the amount of information that goes through with all of those things.
But we did it because we wanted to make better decisions. It also removed a lot of bias, quite honestly, from the decision-making. You can have a very slick presenter with a so-so or even a bad idea. At the end of the day, you want to make the right decision. No one really cares a year later that presentation was awesome, I felt so happy. A high charisma, low judgment person can be a pretty dangerous PowerPoint presenter.
And then, the flip side is you could have someone who isn't particularly good at doing presentations or doesn't like them and isn't a clip art expert who has a great idea, but there just not a good presenter. You get so bored in the presentation. When is this thing going to end? This presenter is lousy. But it's not the presenter that you're really evaluating, it should be the idea. So, narratives, what they do is they surface the idea, and they remove the whole bias of the presentation.
At Amazon, most of the narratives aren't signed by an individual. It's usually a team, and it's collaboratively written. Those are some of the reasons why we decided to do it and experiment with it. It turned out to be one of the better decisions that Amazon made. It's a simple process, and it also wasn't one after that point that needed to be imposed on other groups. They just started copying it, because they saw it was so effective. It wasn't one of those things where from now on you must never use PowerPoint. People started realizing this is actually better. And so, that's how it happened and how it's been used at Amazon.
Guy Kawasaki:
Couldn't somebody make the case that just as someone could be a lousy presenter with a great idea and narrative, what if you're a lousy writer with a great idea? Wouldn't the narrative not do the idea justice just as the presentation itself didn't do it justice?
Colin Bryar:
That's a great question. I haven't seen that. The best narratives that I've seen come from the best thinkers not necessarily the best writers. And so, it's the thinkers, when you can come up with a thoughtful argument.
When I read narratives, I can forgive a spelling error or grammar error or two. I actually worked overseas for a couple years. Some of the best narratives that I read were written by non-native English speakers just because the ideas and the arguments were great. It wasn't flowery prose. It wasn't going to win a Pulitzer Prize. Some people get so caught up in the narratives themselves, but that's a tool to help you make better decisions. And if the idea is surfaced in the right way and you make the right decision, it's a successful narrative, even if it doesn't win a Pulitzer.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is there a specification about in the six pages these are the following sections that must be in there?
Colin Bryar:
No. It's pretty free-form, because they're used for different purposes. One specific type which we talk in the book, which is the working backwards process, that narrative has a press release and a FAQ. That has sections. But the other ones, the reasons it's six pages is because at the right level of information density, it takes about three minutes to read a page. It's a good rule of thumb. A six-pager, it takes 18 minutes to read. Two minutes to say hi to everyone in the meeting, 18 minutes to read, and then 40 minutes to have a deep discussion about the topic, so if you have a 30-minute meeting, you do a three-pager.
Guy Kawasaki:
I walk into this Amazon meeting, and for the first 20 minutes people are reading. It's silent, right?
Colin Bryar:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Why can't you circulate the document in advance and depend on social pressure or whatever that you have read this before you enter the room?
Colin Bryar:
I don't know, but there's some universal law that I found that teams will update their documents until just before the meeting. And so, if you may get an advanced copy the day before or the morning before, it usually changes because people are updating until the last minute. You want to save time, and one way to waste someone's time is to read version two when you're presenting version three at the meeting. We found that this guarantees everyone is reading the same document, as it literally has the same set of information to work with, and spends the right amount of time reading it.
Guy Kawasaki:
My last question about this, because as you can tell I am absolutely fascinated by this, have you ever pitched to a VC, a partnership, trying to raise money, something like that?
Colin Bryar:
Yes, I've worked with VCs.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. I'm sorry, but can you imagine that a venture capital firm says no more PowerPoint, you come in with a six-page document and we're going to spend the first 20 minutes reading it?
Colin Bryar:
I have talked with two VC firms who shall remain nameless who would like to and are trying to encourage teams to switch over to do that. And so, obviously that's their decision to make.
Guy Kawasaki:
Does it start with M?
Colin Bryar:
What's that?
Guy Kawasaki:
Does it start with M?
Colin Bryar:
No.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Colin Bryar:
I wasn't going to help you. But it doesn't end. It really depends on what they want to get out of that, whatever, the VCs, if they're evaluating the person versus the idea. I'm not a VC. I did a little bit of investing. I realized I was bad at it, and I didn't really particularly like it. so I'm more an operator and a builder.
If it were me, if I were looking to see what is this organization about, and if I were going to invest my money in it, I would require some type of a deeper document than a PowerPoint. But those people know what they're doing. They're very successful, so it gets back to when to change the world.
If I were trying to raise money, for instance, if they asked me to go in with the PowerPoint, I'd go in with the PowerPoint rather than saying, no, here's a narrative and risk losing the deal.
Guy Kawasaki:
I can guarantee you that the ability to give a slick presentation is probably as inversely related to your competence as a CEO, but we won't go down that.
Okay, so next topic that fascinated me was the role of three things, which is mock-ups, press releases, and FAQs. Please explain why those three things are so powerful and useful.
Colin Bryar:
That's combined into what Amazon calls the working backwards process. It's also the title of our book. It's one of the most uniquely Amazonian processes. The working backwards process, really what it tries to do and the only thing it tries to do is to start from the customer perspective and then work backwards from that. This can be for a small feature on a webpage or an app to entering a new line of business or to moving in a new geography or starting a whole new inventing cloud computing. Amazon goes through that working backwards process, and it's starting from the customer and working backwards.
Some companies use different ways to develop products in terms of a skills-forward approach about what are we good at, what's the competition doing, show what our strengths and weaknesses, here's an opportunity if we can go in and get this percentage of the market. That is one way of doing it. Amazon really doesn't do that. It starts from here's the customer experience we want.
And so, the first thing, if someone has an idea, "Hey, I have an idea about X," especially if they're new, the managers say, "That's great. Can you go write a working backwards document about that?" The working backwards document is a one-page press release. That's the first thing that's written. That is that you have to explain to your end customer what it is you're building and what's in it for them, and you have to keep it to one page or less. And if at the end of the press release, you don't want to buy that product or use that product, do not pass go. You have to go back and rewrite the press release until you're convinced.
And then, the FAQ helps. There are two portions. One is the external FAQ, which again is explaining to the customer about the product. How much is this product going to cost? Why should I use this product versus what are some of the alternatives that are out there on the market? The internal FAQ, those are the questions that make this problem hard that you need to go solve. So, can we build this device with the bill of materials for under $200 with these sets of features? This product needs a sales force. Will we partner with someone? Will we build our own sales force? What are all the hard parts about building this? You don't necessarily have to solve all of them. You have to identify them and say, "Here's how we're going to solve them."
And then, if it does have a heavy UI component, the mock-ups would help to say, again, here's what the customer's going to experience. Those mock-ups are optional, because some of them these products or features don't have a UI component.
But it's all really about nailing the customer experience upfront before you write a line of code, before you get a budget or headcount to go do something. Very few if any of the ideas or products make it through this process the first time. It's an iterative process.
What else happens once you write it and present it, it's exactly like the narrative meeting. It's 20 minutes of silence, and you get high-quality feedback on that. At that point, it's essentially no longer your idea, which is a bit different. Because you've had another team, if it's your manager or other groups, they're looking at that, they're giving you really great feedback to make the idea and direction to go into. Collectively,` from that point on, that group owns the success or failure of that idea.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would tell you that these two ideas, first, that what's fundamentally wrong with PowerPoint and why a six-page document narrative is better, and the idea of the mock-up, the press release, and the FAQ are worth the book alone. Just those two ideas are so great. I can't tell you how much I love those ideas.
Okay, next big topic, the concept of how you select and recruit employees including, of course, the bar raiser. Explain how Amazon does this.
Colin Bryar:
Actually, in 1999, I believe, is when it started. It was a response to a specific problem where Amazon was growing so fast. You had new people hiring new people hiring new people. That meant you lost control effectively of what people you were attracting at the company. Even if you had a loosely-defined hiring process, you weren't actively going out and knowing what you were vetting, the skills and attributes you're trying to vet for people coming into the company. Unless you have a deliberate hiring process, especially for a company that's small and growing, you're going to lose control of your company culture unless you have a deliberate hiring process.
So, what the bar raiser is all about, it was meant to have a deliberate hiring process to ensure its consistency across groups and teams. And so, it has a couple of unique attributes. One is it looks at the Amazon leadership principles. Each interviewer is assigned two or three of the leadership principles. They have a job to do. Going into the interview, they know what their job is and they know what information they're supposed to get from a candidate. I'm setting aside the functional skills, because this applies to any type of position.
I'm going to go vet for think big, customer obsession, and ownership, so my job as an interviewer, I've got a set of questions. It's usually behavioral interview techniques, which means that you look at the candidate's past performance as the best predictor of future performance. You find out what did they do and how did they approach situations where they needed to think big or have customer obsession.
And so, the next part is the interviewer has to write down their feedback and come up with a vote before talking to anyone else so it removes bias. I can't say, "Hey guy, this is a great candidate. I just interviewed her, and you're going to love this person we should go hire." You now have this inherent bias going into the interview that, okay, I'm going to hire this. I'm now in sell-mode, where that's not the purpose of the interview process. So, you can't see anyone's vote, you can't see anyone's feedback.
And then, the other thing that does is you write down your feedback, I know I'm going to have to write my feedback and defend it in front of my peers. I've been at other companies or witnessed other people that say, "The candidate talked so much I couldn't get a word in edgewise. I don't have enough information to vote." That's a failure of the interviewer not taking control of the interview, because they do have a specific job. You have to get the information that you're assigned to do, because no one interviewer has all of the information. If you don't bring your piece of the puzzle to the hiring decision-making process, you haven't done your job.
The next thing that happens is there's a bar raiser, so the bar-raiser process. But there's a role called the bar raiser. That's a trained interviewer. First of all, they're not in the hiring chain of the group that's hiring the person. Whether the person gets hired or not, they don't have a bias. The urgency bias is another one that creeps in. We need two people or else we're not going to hit our goals. Their job is to make sure that hiring bar stays consistently high and to train all of the other interviewers. They have veto power. It doesn't matter who else is in on the interview. It could be VPs, senior VPs, the hiring manager. If everyone wants to hire, if the bar raiser doesn't want to, they have veto power and the person doesn't get hired.
In practice, that veto doesn't really get used, because a good bar raiser is there to help train. It's there to help the hiring manager make the right hiring decision. That is another unique aspect.
And then, the last part is the debrief. It's usually anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes per candidate. Probably, 30 minutes is more common. That's again like another Amazon meeting where you read all of the written feedback. You look at the votes. And then, you have a discussion on it.
For me, where that really helps is that this is a feedback loop that makes the bar-raiser process get better the more time you run through it. I see sometimes feedback about, oh, how did you actually pull this information out of this candidate? I couldn't figure that out. You learn new interviewing techniques by just watching and reading the feedback of how other people interviewed. Or you can ask them at the time. Or I teach other people. They ask me, "How did you get this?" Well, I noticed either hesitation or it was a fluffy answer, so I needed to peel one or two layers deeper to get to the root of the issue.
And so, interviewers, the more time that they go through it with the bar raiser and these debrief meetings, they just become better interviewers. It's a simple process. It scales. It's teachable. You can replicate it across many groups. It's also one of Amazon's secret weapons in terms of how you consistently hire the right people. Amazon does have a consistent culture across geographies, across different business lines. By and large, it's due to the bar-raiser process.
Guy Kawasaki:
The bar raiser has a full-time job too?
Colin Bryar:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, why not institutionalize the bar-raising function into the HR department?
Colin Bryar:
I think that you're a better interviewer if you are running and operating or are involved in a business. If you just become a professional interviewer, that becomes harder. And also, there are some functional skills. If you're interviewing software engineers, it helps to know about software engineering. Those are a couple of reasons why.
HR does play an important facilitating role, but at the end of the day, it's the hiring manager's responsibility to hire the right people and it's the bar raiser's responsibility to make sure that the processes are followed. You don't get extra points for it, but one of the most important things that you can do at the company is attract the right talent. People are willing to put the time in it, because it will help everyone achieve their long-term goals.
Guy Kawasaki:
If you think about it, that ties into the fact that salaries are low and your income really is related to stock price which is dependent upon success which is dependent upon hiring the right people. It all works, right?
Colin Bryar:
Yeah. That's what Amazon, I think, has done pretty well. They have 14 leadership principles. The reason they are not just a poster on the wall is because they are woven into all of the important processes that Amazon does. And so, the ownership and the long-term thinking is an example of how can you weave that into the bar raiser process. So, yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
My favorite line from the book is missionaries not mercenaries. I thought that was just brilliant. I don't know if it was Bill or you, but whoever thought of that line is utterly fantastic.
The next thing that just fascinated me was this example that in order to get more women hired, there was a department that had a decision that every resume from a woman got a phone screen. Tell me about that. That is such a great idea.
Colin Bryar:
A lot of the ideas just bubble up from within. It was a director for a group that really was trying to build a more diverse workplace and wasn't succeeding and so just tried something. The bar never lowered. I would say it uncovered some biases that people didn't know were happening. And so, it wasn't anything more or less than let's try this, let's see if it works. You have to stick with it a little while for an experiment. It did work and then got noticed. And then, you can shout about it and say, I did this, and here's how it helped my team or my department recruit a more diverse workplace.
Guy Kawasaki:
Why not apply that to race?
Colin Bryar:
There are some teams where you just strip the name off the top of the resume. You look at a resume, sometimes you can even go further with schools or company names. Some people think, this person went to school X or worked at company Y, they must be great. Well, school X and company Y, they have plenty of great people, but they have plenty of people who probably won't do so well in your organization. It is important to really strip the bias out and rely on the process itself.
It's harder than it sounds. I make it sound like it's, oh yeah, just got to eliminate the bias. They're inherent biases, so they're difficult to find and get rid of.
Guy Kawasaki:
But I would make the case that this every woman gets at least a phone interview, it's beyond erasing the bias. It's actually compensating. Because not every man got a phone interview, every woman got an interview overcame an inherent weakness, right? It forced more women candidates down the pipe, which is why I loved the idea.
I would also say, do you think that the first step being a phone interview levels the field? Because if the first step is an in-person interview, I think that the way people dress, are they attractive or not, do they have body odor, you pick up cues in person that you cannot pick up by phone. Do you think that may also have a field-leveling effect?
Colin Bryar:
It could. One of the best pieces of advice that I received early on in the bar-raiser process is someone told me, "When I form my initial impression in the first two minutes of the interview, I spend the rest of the interview trying to convince myself that impression was wrong." I thought that was just a good thing to keep in mind. That's basically saying if you see someone or for whatever you form an opinion, it's by definition uninformed, because you haven't uncovered hardly any information. And so, you want to get rid of that. You can do that either on the phone or over a Zoom interview or in person.
To me, I think the phone does help. It removes some of that. It also makes it a little harder to interview, I found, because there are verbal cues you can get. You can tell whether someone's nervous, in which case you want to make them less nervous. Or if they don't really know what they're talking about, you want to make sure are they qualified to do this type of job. You have to tell the difference between nervous or they actually aren't qualified to be a software engineer. To me, I find that's a little easier to do in person. But the piece of advice about the first two minutes, at least it works for me.
Guy Kawasaki:
If I understood the compensation correctly, I mentioned this earlier, there's a limit of $160,000 or some number like that. The bulk of the true wealth creation occurs because of the stock price. Now, it happens to be working well because Amazon's stock price has continuously been going up. But what if there are outside factors that an employee cannot control that makes the stock tank? Then what? Do you have a recruiting and retention problem?
Colin Bryar:
The stock will go up and down. I don't know what it is today, but it's going to be lower than it is today, I'm quite certain, at some point in time. And so, what long-term thinking reinforces, the stock vests over a period of years. You look at, well, what is the stock price doing today? You'd go crazy if you did that ever day. Even early on, it was a rollercoaster ride. Spreading it out over years...
And the grants come every year. The stock went down by a lot, your next grant, they look at the total compensation. There would be more stock, number of stock units that are granted in the following year. So, if there were some structural change, there would be some adjustment, but it doesn't come on the stock really dropped 20% this quarter. I'd be shocked if there were any compensation adjustments, because Amazon's not looking at what's the stock going to be next quarter. It's what's it going to be five, 10 years from now, and how can it grow? Those are the type of people that you want.
In the dot.com bubble and busts-dating myself-you could tell the people who were there for the short-term pop. And then, when it didn't go, they opted out of the company. But the people who stayed were really the people, the builders who wanted to build and make a difference at scale to lots of people. Culture's are self-selecting, so that tells you the compensation just reinforces those type of people.
Guy Kawasaki:
Next topic, single-threaded leadership, another great topic, tell me about this.
Colin Bryar:
Some of these processes are actually developed as direct results of trying to solve specific problems that Amazon had. Amazon realized that as Amazon was growing, one, the technology infrastructure was making it take longer to build things and deploy services out to the website or to the fulfillment centers, and then, two, the organization was growing. It was harder to go figure out who is the right person to talk to to make the right decisions. We found we were spending more time coordinating and communicating than actually building and creating value for customers.
And so, two approaches you can take are let's build more collaboration and communication tools and we'll be world-class in collaboration tools. Jeff basically said the opposite, "No, I want to eliminate communication and coordination. I'd love to have small autonomous teams."
And so, the first iteration started out as what we call two-pizza teams. They're called two-pizza teams because if the two pizzas aren't enough to feed the whole team, the team's probably too big. You need to cleave it in half and separate the space. The two-pizza teams, it's not just an org change. You have to change how you make decisions. The org change is actually the easiest part. You just change the reporting structures about how you make decisions, who's responsible for what. And then, the second part, you need to make sure that you have a technical architecture where there aren't all of these embedded dependencies between teams where if I want to go do something, I've got to get another team to change a couple of APIs. Or if they're shared libraries that you're using, that's even worse. Or if they're mucking in your code base, everyone's on the same code base, that's the worst level.
We were at the worst level in some instances in trying to rapidly move forward to separate. We had to do one move to a services-based architecture and invent and develop some things to make that happen at scale and then come up with an org structure and decision-making structure on how you could do these things.
What was interesting is that some people, again, just opted out. If you're, I don't know, let's say a chief product officer, that role doesn't really exist in independent, two-pizza team structure. You say, "Okay, I'm going to go now work on fulfillment center problems." Amazon didn't have a chief product officer, but this is something that I've seen at other companies who typically want to move to a services-based architecture with small, separable teams. By definition, that person doesn't have enough information to make all of the "product decisions". You want people waking up every day, in the shower, going out for a run, thinking about here's my domain space, how can I solve my customers' set of specific problems? You don't want someone like a chief product officer or chief innovation officer to come and say, "Here's how you need to innovate," or "Here's what you want to build." It's just antithetical to that.
The first iteration was these two-pizza teams. You'd have fitness functions. It was the geeky thing about you instrument your own group. You have one composite metric that should go up into the right. That turns out that was a waste of time. It didn't work. We moved away. But we found out really once we had the services-based architecture and we could have separable teams, what was really the most important thing in a lot of Amazon meetings, especially when a project is not going well, you'll hear the question, who is the senior-most leader working on this problem that is thinking about this problem and nothing but this problem? If it happens to be a junior product manager who just joined, and you're trying to build a large business, which you'd be surprised at how often that happens, then you're not setting that project up for success. And so, that's where the concept of the single-threaded leader and single-threaded teams comes in.
If it's big enough, which we weren't doing, you should have someone running that who that's all that they think about. They also have the appropriate skill set that they can do the job. The junior product manager may be a great person, but they're probably not going to be able to build a Kindle and come up with a whole digital device.
A great example of a single-threaded leader was Steve Kessel, who's no longer at Amazon, but he was running Amazon's biggest business, the media, books, music, and video business, the physical books, music, and DVD. Jeff took him off that business and put him on the business that was effectively zero at that point which was digital. Steve, at first, and Bill, he was the second in place... Well, why can't we run both, because digital is so small? But that violated the single-threaded leader. The digital group decisions would always lose because they'd be outweighed by, yeah, but we have this business that's keeping the lights on.
So, I think that's a powerful example of where a single-threaded leader can go and run with a specific problem and not worry. Even if you're talking to the same set of partners by the way, the publishers, the music labels, it's just a different business. Amazon set that up because it was so important to take...
It wasn't a career-buster for Steve either, which at some companies it would be to say, yesterday I had a huge head count, and now it's Bill and me, and I'm responsible for this business that's not bringing any revenue and it won't for the foreseeable future. Andy Jassy did roughly the same thing for Web Services. And so, that's the concept of a single-threaded leader.
Dave Limp, who's the senior vice president of devices at Amazon, has a great quote. It's that the best way to fail at inventing something is to make it someone's part-time job. And so, it sticks in if it's important enough to where you want this thing to succeed, you should have someone thinking about it full-time.
Guy Kawasaki:
He's from Apple. I worked with him.
Colin Bryar:
Oh, you did? Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, he's from Apple. I don't know how much time I have. Obviously, you can tell I love the book, because I've got a lot of questions.
Colin Bryar:
Thank you very much.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't know if that's good or bad. You might think, oh god, that was the longest interview, why didn't I just have some dumb-ass podcaster ask me really simple, softball questions that he just figured out from Wikipedia?
There are three inside stories that you mentioned. I would like to hear them all. I'll give you a choice. You can do as many as you like or as few as you like, but minimum one, okay?
Colin Bryar:
Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
Minimum one, I want to know and you to explain the inside story of either Kindle, Prime, or AWS. Pick one.
Colin Bryar:
I'll start with Prime, mostly because when we wrote the book and I showed that Prime chapter to other people, they said, "Yeah, but this is different. In the Prime story that we've seen, it all starts after the Prime story that you wrote happened," even people who still work at Amazon. So, I'll start there because I think it's something that may not be as well-known.
These ideas, sometimes they accrue over time. There's not a single a-ha moment about let there be Prime. Amazon back in 2003, and then Prime came out in February 2005, so 2003 and 2004, the growth rate of the physical media business, and that's shipping physical books, CDs, and DVDs, that was 77% of Amazon's business. The growth rates were actually slowing down. It was still growing, but the internet was growing faster, which meant that Amazon was becoming less and less relevant if it's growing slower than the rate of e-commerce on the internet. So, we had tried several different things to how can you turn that growth trend around and make it grow faster.
Amazon has a concept of the flywheel. There's the price, selection, and convenience. One of the things that I thought was notable about Prime is that we didn't say, well, let's go run a bunch of promotions or try things that were giveaways just to juice the short-term growth. We knew that we had to stay within that triangle of price, selection, and convenience. We didn't know where it would be. If you lowered prices by half a percent or 1% on average, obviously it would be more for certain products, lowering prices is easy, but figuring out how you lower your cost structure so you can do that is the hard part. Or should we stay the course and just keep adding more selection, more products to the catalog? We were doing all of that, and it still wasn't working.
So, convenience, which is the shipping time that we really look there, people had ideas. Hey, we should be shipping overnight these giant flat-screen TVs. They're very expensive. We have plenty of gross margin, and we should just ship those overnight. This is a case where the technical architecture made it too hard to go do that at Amazon, because it didn't really treat products all the same. It wasn't worth it to just do a hacker change just for flat-screen TVs.
Those ideas had existed before. This was one of those projects that would have never gotten done until... Jeff would send an email, I would be on those emails. I'd see all the response, be involved in the dialogue, and it was with a relatively small group of people. The category managers, finance, and some of the folks in logistics about what can we do to get products faster, there were always excuses about, well, why can't we do this?
This is where what Jeff would call the institutional no creeps in. There are lots of great reasons why you couldn't do it, and then the holiday season was coming up. Finally, Jeff just said, "We're going to launch a free shipping program. I don't even know actually what it's going to be at this point, but we're going to do it by the end of the year. Let's get started."
And so, that was where I would call the beginning of the official Prime. We knew we were going to do it. We didn't know what it was. We didn't know who was on the team yet. We didn't know if it was free two-day shipping, free express shipping, or does it include third-party products or not. But we were marching on that road and we were going to go do it.
Another reason not to do it, by the way, was if it worked we had just spent the better part of 10 years coming up with a supply chain and a delivery chain, and we were getting relatively competent at shipping out products in three to five days cheaply and reliably to customers. Now, we're saying we need to do it in two days or less. If that works, this whole infrastructure that we built, it needs to be changed. So, we haven't even gotten our return on that investment yet.
But this is where long-term thinking and customer focus and willingness to invent and cannibalize yourself comes in that, well, if we don't do it, someone else is going to create a version of Amazon Prime. It's going to be obsolete anyway, so we may as well be the ones who make this infrastructure obsolete. Also, if it didn't work, there are not that many Prime members. It launched in February. We didn't have 150 million Prime members in March. And so, I think that there were a couple of things for Prime.
By the way, if Jeff, it was in October, I believe, said, "No, I've thought about it, and you guys are right. Holidays are coming up. Let's not do it. We'll revisit it in 2005," he probably would have been lauded internally. You know, "Hey, you made the right decision to go do that." That would have been one of the biggest errors of omission that has been made, because a large chunk of the growth of the e-commerce business at Amazon is directly due to Prime. Prime gets better. Their delivery times are going down further and further. Now, people expect it in hours and minutes instead of two days.
Guy Kawasaki:
And video.
Colin Bryar:
Yes, and Prime Video, it added more and more. Jeff early on said, "We are going to add more to this. It's not just going to be a free two-day shipping." That was one of those things that wasn't...
People knew that we wanted to ship faster to customers. There's always good reasons not to do it. And no one was really responsible for it, because it took people from the website, the category managers. There were physical processes that needed to be changed in the fulfillment centers. It was one of those tangled, messy projects that doesn't have a clear owner. Unless you say, we're going to go do this, someone like the CEO, it's not going to get done.
Guy Kawasaki:
Doesn't this contradict the single-thread theory, or was Jeff the single thread?
Colin Bryar:
This is also when some of these processes like the working backwards and single-thread leaders, those were developing at this time. So, the time really between, I would say, 2002 and 2005 or 2006, Amazon spent a lot of time and effort into how do we instrument and build a company that can launch and scale and grow 10X. We were figuring some of these things out as we went along. They weren't fully codified yet.
Stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details is what Jeff says a lot. Sometimes you just realize I'm the only one who can make this decision. It won't be made unless I make it, and there's no better time to do it than today.
I talk about how messy it was. It was a relatively small project, because it was aimed for convenience-oriented and some of our top customers at first. It wasn't meant to appeal to the whole customer base, because you had to pay $79 to order, and a lot of people just ordered from Amazon at that time one or two times a year. You wouldn't pay $80 bucks to get two-day shipping. You'd be better off just paying two-day shipping for the two orders a year you place on Amazon.
Those are a couple lessons that are embedded in Prime. There are articles out there about what happened after Jeff sent that email and how the team got together. They did incredible work, and they worked hard on tight deadlines. There are lots of projects like that. But I think the better lessons for the readers are what led up to that. How do you spot when the institutional no is really slowing you down? When do you need to accept that what we built is good but it's not good enough, and no matter how much it costs we need to go try something different? Those are some of the lessons that I personally got, and I was lucky to see the back and forth with Jeff and that small group of individuals on what led to Prime.
That's one. I can go on forever on this stuff. I love talking about it.
Guy Kawasaki:
But you know what? We're going to leave Kindle and AWS off the table. If you want to hear the great stories about Kindle and AWS, buy the book. I have two more questions for you, okay?
Colin Bryar:
All right. Fire away.
Guy Kawasaki:
Question number one is for you or for Jeff. Where do you do your deepest thinking? Your most innovative ideas, how do you set yourself up for that? Is it something that just happens when you're running? Or do you get a quiet space? Do you have a technique for forcing yourself to come up with deep thoughts and great ideas and innovation? That's question one.
Colin Bryar:
There are two things that I do. One is uniquely Amazonian. It's really to get yourself in the customer mindset and look at everything through the eyes of the customer. You realize that, hey, it can be better. What don't I like about this process?
One small example of that would be the returns process at Amazon. No one likes returning stuff to companies. Usually, you return it, it takes a while. You have to go to the post office. You buy the postage. And then, if they accept your return, six or eight weeks later, you'll see something on your credit card. I don't know who did this at Amazon, but they said, "The return process could be better." So Amazon, they'll refund you. When you say, "I want to return it and here's why," you get the refund. And then, Amazon still checks to make sure that the product actually was delivered and came.
The thinking was that 99.5% of the people, our customers, are trying to do the right thing. Why are we penalizing them because a small percent of people are trying to defraud the company? Let's flip it on its head, and let's not make a return process being so painful. It builds more trust, which eventually is better for the long-term health of the company.
So, putting yourself in that customer mindset allows you to do things that you normally wouldn't do if you're just looking at spreadsheets or what is this going to do to revenue, because customer trust is one of those things... At Amazon, Jeff has said that we hold a conviction that the long-term interests of shareholders are completely aligned with the long-term interests of customers. You can't shake Jeff or anyone at Amazon from that statement. If you do what's right for customers, it will be aligned with shareholders.
Personally, the second thing I do, and this is not necessarily Amazonian, but you mentioned running. If I'm wrestling with a particular issue, I'll throw on my running shoes, and I'll head out. For me, what that does it sounds weird to say, but it separates my body and mind. My mind goes someplace while my body's chugging along the streets. I get to think about the problem. A lot of times I find out when I'm at peace with that issue that, okay, I think I have it or I think I see a way out of this problem. Everyone has their own way to do that second part.
But the first part anyone could do in terms of that's the difference between customer focus and customer obsession, just seeing everything through the minds of the customer.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. My last question, it's not really a question. It is a question. I just want to give you an idea. You can tell me I'm nuts. I think that what we should do is you should be able to order your vaccination at Amazon, and then the Amazon truck and the Amazon logistics, which truly knows how to reach anybody in America right away, either the driver or there's a nurse with the driver or some qualified person, you can order and get your vaccine from Amazon. I know it sounds like a weird idea, but I truly do believe if Jeff said, "Now you can go to Amazon, order your vaccination, a driver will come who's trained or with a nurse or whatever, and you can get your vaccine." I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy that...
Colin Bryar:
I'm sure there are people who are entertaining ideas like that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you trying to be nice to me?
Colin Bryar:
No, I'm saying that if you think about what is in the long-term interests of customers. Quite honestly, this situation is an area that's going to require a ton of innovation and us to do things that we didn't even think were possible or that we could do. Ideas like that, I could put you in touch with someone who's...
You know, Amazon, they've got over a million employees and have to figure out how to test those million employees on a regular basis. That's at a much smaller scale than what you're talking about. But I would be surprised if ideas like that aren't being discussed right now. I have no inside information on that. But at Amazon, you would not be laughed out of the room for that idea. You'd be asked to write a press release and a FAQ for it.
Guy Kawasaki:
No problem.
Colin Bryar:
To see if there's anything to do, but yeah, it's a great idea.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm really losing it now, but can you imagine if Amazon said, "Amazon Prime members get a free vaccination. Click here." Oh my god. I give you that idea, and if it happens I'm going to claim credit for it.
Imagine a world where you have a staff meeting and the first 20 minutes are silent because everybody's reading the same six-page document. That document has three parts: a press release, a FAQ, and screenshots. No PowerPoint, no pitches, my head is exploding.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Remarkable People with the remarkable Colin Bryar. Be sure to check out his book, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. My thanks to Jeff Sieh and Peg Fitzpatrick who worked backwards from you, the listener, to create the most remarkable podcast we can. Remember, don't go into crowded places, wash your hands, wear a mask, and get vaccinated. Mahalo and aloha.
This is Remarkable People.