Colin Bryar on the Practice of Amazon's Weekly Business Review

Commonplace Expertise

Colin Bryar joined Amazon really early in its life and spent twelve years as part of Amazon's senior leadership team.

For two of those years he was 'Technical Assistant' to Jeff Bezos, as known as 'Jeff's shadow', during which he spent each day attending meetings, traveling with, and discussing business and life with Jeff. After Amazon, he and his family relocated to Singapore for two years where Colin served as Chief Operating Officer of e-commerce company RedMart, which was subsequently sold to Alibaba. Along with his ex-Amazonian colleague Bill Carr, Colin is co-author of Working Backwards, a book on an insider's look at how Amazon works. Bill and Colin are co-founders of Working Backwards LLC, where they coach executives at both large and early-stage companies on how to implement the management practices developed at Amazon.

This podcast is a really deep dive into the practice of the Amazon Weekly Business Review, which remains to this day one of Amazon's secret operating weapons, and a big part of what makes for a great operator.

Working Backwards, book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53138083
Working Backwards https://www.workingbackwards.com/
Commoncog summary of Working Backwards: https://commoncog.com/working-backwards/

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (01:24) - Colin's Background
• (04:00) - Joining Amazon
• (06:31) - The Data Situation in Early Amazon
• (08:22) - Being Jeff Bezos's Shadow
• (10:37) - Living in Singapore
• (12:07) - Writing Working Backwards with Bill Carr
• (15:17) - The History of the Weekly Business Review
• (17:50) - How the Amazon WBR is different
• (20:45) - Customer Experience Metrics vs Business Metrics
• (22:33) - Controllable Input Metrics vs Output Metrics
• (30:39) - What a Typical WBR Looks Like
• (34:22) - Why Glancing at Metrics is Important
• (35:43) - What kinds of discussions should you have in the WBR?
• (37:30) - Understanding Variation
• (41:28) - Stories About Figuring Out Controllable Input Metrics
• (48:19) - Applying the WBR to internal business functions
• (49:49) - Introducing the WBR to a New Company
• (55:55) - Applying the WBR to New Products
• (01:01:04) - Not Using Surveys as Primary Research on Customers
• (01:04:17) - What Makes for a Good Operator?
• (01:05:23) - Operating Cadence
• (01:07:05) - What Colin Wishes All Operators Knew Tomorrow
• (01:07:57) - What You'd Wish You'd Known
• (01:09:50) - Would Many of These Lessons Apply to Early Stage Startups?