Lessons from Colin Bryar

Colin Bryar, a former senior executive at Amazon and co-author of the influential book "Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon," played a pivotal role in the company's meteoric rise. During his 12-year tenure, which included two years as Jeff Bezos's "shadow" or chief of staff, Bryar was instrumental in developing and scaling the unique processes and principles that define Amazon's culture of relentless innovation and customer-centricity.

On Customer Obsession

"Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers." [1]
"The customer is also at the center of how we analyze and manage performance metrics." [2]
"Better customer experience leads to more traffic. More traffic attracts more sellers seeking those buyers. More sellers lead to wider selection. Wider selection enhances customer experience, completing the circle. The cycle drives growth, which in turn lowers cost structure. Lower costs lead to lower prices, improving customer experience, and the flywheel spins faster." [2][3]
"Our culture is four things: customer obsession instead of competitor obsession; willingness to think long term, with a longer investment horizon than most of our peers; eagerness to invent, which of course goes hand in hand with failure; and then, finally, taking professional pride in operational excellence." [1][2]
"If we start with the customer and work backwards, then the most logical conclusion is that we need to create our own devices." [4]
"Always start with what customers want, and work backwards from there. Find a problem, and solve it, rather than having a solution looking for a problem to solve." [5]
"Be customer obsessed, not competitor obsessed. Look after the interests of your customers first, and everything else will fall into place." [5]

On Innovation and the "Working Backwards" Process

"The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody's part-time job." [2][3]
"start by defining the customer experience, then iteratively work backwards from that point until the team achieves clarity of thought around what to build." [2][3]
"Working Backwards is a systematic way to vet ideas and create new products." [4][6]
"Writing a press release that literally announces the product as if it were ready to launch, and an FAQ anticipating the tough questions." [4]
"Half-baked thinking was harder to disguise on the written page than in PowerPoint slides." [4]
"And finally there is the product development process that gives this book its name: working backwards from the desired customer experience.” [7]
"With all other things being equal, the organization that moves faster will innovate more, simply because it will be able to conduct a higher number of experiments per unit of time." [3]
"It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work beforehand." [8]
"We need to plant many seeds, because we don't know which one of those seeds will grow into a mighty oak." [1]
"The ‘Working Backwards’ process fosters innovation and customer-centric product development." [9]
"Trial and error, then success." [4]

On Leadership and Decision-Making

"most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow." [1][2]
"If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure." [1][2]
"Good intentions don't work. Mechanisms do." [4][10]
"We use our Leadership Principles every day, whether we're discussing ideas for new projects or deciding on the best approach to solving a problem." [4]
"Leaders are owners. They think long term and don't sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say, 'that's not my job.'" [1]
"Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others." [1]
"Leaders have relentlessly high standards—many people may think these standards are unreasonably high." [1]
"Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly." [11]
"You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can't choose two out of three." [4]
"Bringing clarity to why you aren't doing something is often as important as having clarity about what you are doing." [4]
"I can say confidently that the extra time we spent slowing down to uncover the necessary truths was ultimately a faster path to a large and successful business.” [12]
"The leadership principles really are there for a consistent decision-making framework when you need to move fast you don't have all the information you'd like to have." [8]
"You want to give them essentially a minimum sufficient set of guideposts and principles to operate on when you're not in the room." [13]

On Building a High-Performing Culture and Teams

"As Amazon grew, we realized that despite our best efforts, we were spending too much time coordinating and not enough time building." [2]
"Each overlap created one kind of dependency, which describes something one team needs but can't supply for itself... Managing dependencies requires coordination—two or more people sitting down to hash out a solution—and coordination takes time." [2][3]
"The Amazon 'Bar Raiser' process has proved to be a scalable way to identify and attract leaders who themselves become instrumental in growing and expanding Amazon across the globe." [6]
"Hitting every one of them would be a clear sign that the bar had been set too low." [2]
"Ideally, the bar continues to be set higher, so much that, eventually, employees should be able to say to themselves, “I'm glad I joined when I did. If I interviewed for a job today, I'm not sure I'd be hired!"" [2]
"Coordination increases and productivity decreases as organizations grow. Amazon combatted this tendency by shifting to separable teams with single-threaded leadership…in which a single person, unencumbered by competing responsibilities, owns a single major initiative and heads up a separable, largely autonomous team to deliver its goals." [6]
"You're going to get a culture whether you like it or not, it's just is it the one that you want." [13][14]
"To figure out your leadership principles... what are the hard decisions that we're going to face as a company moving forward." [13]
"Small, agile teams promote collaboration and efficiency." [9]

On Operational Excellence and Problem-Solving

"When you encounter a problem, the probability you're actually looking at the actual root cause of the problem in the initial 24 hours is pretty close to zero, because it turns out that behind every issue there's a very interesting story.” [2][3]
"In the end, if you stick with identifying the true root causes of variation and eliminating them, you'll have a predictable, in-control process that you can optimize." [2][3]
"Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle." [11]
"Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed." [11]
"Manage your business inputs, not outputs. Put the customer at the center of all performance metrics. Emphasize inputs you do manage and control, and activities which will yield the desired results. Do that well, and the output metrics like revenue and stock price will take care of themselves." [5]
"Amazon is hyper-focused not on the outputs, but on these inputs—questions like, “How do we lower prices?” and “How do we add greater selection?” By focusing on those inputs, the process improves, and that results in the right outputs."
" [15]Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense." [11]

On Long-Term Thinking

"Long-term thinking often gets you to your goal faster because you know where you're ending up and so you're not doing the zigging and zagging." [8]
"Unlike many companies that focus on short-term profits, Amazon prioritizes long-term value creation." [16]
"We have an unshakeable conviction that the long-term interests of shareowners are perfectly aligned with the interests of customers." [5]

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